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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".
Canonical Huffman codes address these two issues by generating the codes in a clear standardized format; all the codes for a given length are assigned their values sequentially. This means that instead of storing the structure of the code tree for decompression only the lengths of the codes are required, reducing the size of the encoded data.
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.
This is not generally possible with codes that lack the prefix property, for example {0, 1, 10, 11}: a receiver reading a "1" at the start of a code word would not know whether that was the complete code word "1", or merely the prefix of the code word "10" or "11"; so the string "10" could be interpreted either as a single codeword or as the ...
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
More precisely, the source coding theorem states that for any source distribution, the expected code length satisfies [(())] [ (())], where is the number of symbols in a code word, is the coding function, is the number of symbols used to make output codes and is the probability of the source symbol. An entropy coding attempts to ...
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.
Huffman coding and arithmetic coding (when they can be used) give at least as good, and often better compression than any universal code.. However, universal codes are useful when Huffman coding cannot be used — for example, when one does not know the exact probability of each message, but only knows the rankings of their probabilities.