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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".
To make the code a canonical Huffman code, the codes are renumbered. The bit lengths stay the same with the code book being sorted first by codeword length and secondly by alphabetical value of the letter: B = 0 A = 11 C = 101 D = 100 Each of the existing codes are replaced with a new one of the same length, using the following algorithm:
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.
Huffman coding is a more sophisticated technique for constructing variable-length prefix codes. 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.)
A Huffman code is a variable-length string of bits that identifies a unique token. A Huffman-threaded interpreter locates subroutines using an index table or a tree of pointers that can be navigated by the Huffman code. Huffman-threaded code is one of the most compact representations known for a computer program. The index and codes are chosen ...
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.
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 .
Efficiency: By assigning shorter codes to frequently occurring symbols, Huffman coding reduces the average code length, resulting in efficient data representation and reduced storage requirements. Compatibility: Huffman coding is widely supported and can be seamlessly integrated into existing image compression standards and algorithms.