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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".
More frequently used symbols will be assigned a shorter code. For example, suppose we have the following non-canonical codebook: A = 11 B = 0 C = 101 D = 100 Here the letter A has been assigned 2 bits, B has 1 bit, and C and D both have 3 bits. To make the code a canonical Huffman code, the codes are renumbered
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.
When naively Huffman coding binary strings, no compression is possible, even if entropy is low (e.g. ({0, 1}) has probabilities {0.95, 0.05}). Huffman encoding assigns 1 bit to each value, resulting in a code of the same length as the input. By contrast, arithmetic coding compresses bits well, approaching the optimal compression ratio of
If symbols are assigned in ranges of lengths being powers of 2, we would get Huffman coding. For example, a->0, b->100, c->101, d->11 prefix code would be obtained for tANS with "aaaabcdd" symbol assignment. Example of generation of tANS tables for m = 3 size alphabet and L = 16 states, then applying them for stream decoding.
However, the original paper, "A fast algorithm for optimal length-limited Huffman codes", shows how this can be improved to O(nL)-time and O(n)-space. The idea is to run the algorithm a first time, only keeping enough data to be able to determine two equivalent subproblems that sum to half the size of the original problem.
The standard way to represent a signal made of 4 symbols is by using 2 bits/symbol, but the entropy of the source is 1.73 bits/symbol. If this Huffman code is used to represent the signal, then the entropy is lowered to 1.83 bits/symbol; it is still far from the theoretical limit because the probabilities of the symbols are different from negative powers of two.
Shannon–Fano codes are suboptimal in the sense that they do not always achieve the lowest possible expected codeword length, as Huffman coding does. [1] However, Shannon–Fano codes have an expected codeword length within 1 bit of optimal. Fano's method usually produces encoding with shorter expected lengths than Shannon's method.