Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In computer science and information theory, a Huffman code is a particular type of optimal prefix code that is commonly used for lossless data compression.The process of finding or using such a code is Huffman coding, an algorithm developed by David A. Huffman while he was a Sc.D. student at MIT, and published in the 1952 paper "A Method for the Construction of Minimum-Redundancy Codes".
In order for a symbol code scheme such as the Huffman code to be decompressed, the same model that the encoding algorithm used to compress the source data must be provided to the decoding algorithm so that it can use it to decompress the encoded data. In standard Huffman coding this model takes the form of a tree of variable-length codes, with ...
The Huffman coding algorithm takes as input the frequencies that the code words should have, and constructs a prefix code that minimizes the weighted average of the code word lengths. (This is closely related to minimizing the entropy.) This is a form of lossless data compression based on entropy encoding.
An entropy coding attempts to approach this lower bound. Two of the most common entropy coding techniques are Huffman coding and arithmetic coding. [2] If the approximate entropy characteristics of a data stream are known in advance (especially for signal compression), a simpler static code may be useful.
Adaptive Huffman coding (also called Dynamic Huffman coding) is an adaptive coding technique based on Huffman coding. It permits building the code as the symbols are being transmitted, having no initial knowledge of source distribution, that allows one-pass encoding and adaptation to changing conditions in data.
Modified Huffman coding is used in fax machines to encode black-on-white images . It combines the variable-length codes of Huffman coding with the coding of repetitive data in run-length encoding . The basic Huffman coding provides a way to compress files with much repeating data, like a file containing text, where the alphabet letters are the ...
To spot matches, the encoder must keep track of some amount of the most recent data, such as the last 2 KB, 4 KB, or 32 KB. The structure in which this data is held is called a sliding window, which is why LZ77 is sometimes called sliding-window compression. The encoder needs to keep this data to look for matches, and the decoder needs to keep ...
The package-merge algorithm is an O(nL)-time algorithm for finding an optimal length-limited Huffman code for a given distribution on a given alphabet of size n, where no code word is longer than L. It is a greedy algorithm , and a generalization of Huffman's original algorithm .