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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:
Instructions to generate the necessary Huffman tree immediately follow the block header. The static Huffman option is used for short messages, where the fixed saving gained by omitting the tree outweighs the percentage compression loss due to using a non-optimal (thus, not technically Huffman) code. Compression is achieved through two steps:
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 ...
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.
Although Huffman coding is just one of many algorithms for deriving prefix codes, prefix codes are also widely referred to as "Huffman codes", even when the code was not produced by a Huffman algorithm. The term comma-free code is sometimes also applied as a synonym for prefix-free codes [1] [2] but in most mathematical books and articles (e.g ...
Huffman came up with the algorithm when a professor offered students to either take the traditional final exam, or improve a leading algorithm for data compression. [5] Huffman reportedly was more proud of his work "The Synthesis of Sequential Switching Circuits," [1] which was the topic of his 1953 MIT thesis (an abridged version of which was ...
With this reduction, the algorithm is O(nL)-time and O(nL)-space. 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 ...