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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".
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.)
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 .
The stored block option adds minimal overhead and is used for data that is incompressible. Most compressible data will end up being encoded using method 10, the dynamic Huffman encoding, which produces an optimized Huffman tree customized for each block of data individually. Instructions to generate the necessary Huffman tree immediately follow ...
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.
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 first selection value in the table, zero, is only used for differential coding in the hierarchical mode of operation. Once all the samples are predicted, the differences between the samples can be obtained and entropy-coded in a lossless fashion using Huffman coding or arithmetic coding.
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 ...