Huffman coding

In computer science and information theory, Huffman coding is an entropy encoding algorithm used for lossless data compression. The term refers to the use of a variable-length code table for encoding a source symbol (such as a character in a file) where the variable-length code table has been derived in a particular way based on the estimated probability of occurrence for each possible value of the source symbol. It was developed by David A. Huffman while he was a Ph.D. student at MIT, and published in the 1952 paper "A Method for the Construction of Minimum-Redundancy Codes." Huffman became a member of the MIT faculty upon graduation and was later the founding member of the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, now a part of the Baskin School of Engineering.
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A coding technique used to compact data by representing the more common events with short codes and the less common events with longer codes. (188 ) Note: Huffman coding is used in Group 3 facsimile.

<algorithm> A data compression technique which varies the length of the encoded symbol in proportion to its information content, that is the more often a symbol or token is used, the shorter the binary string used to represent it in the compressed stream. Huffman codes can be properly decoded because they obey the prefix property, which means that no code can be a prefix of another code, and so the complete set of codes can be represented as a binary tree, known as a Huffman tree. Huffman coding was first described in a seminal paper by D.A. Huffman in 1952.
(1994-12-23)