Housekeeping for Prefix Coding


Andrew Turpin
Department of Computer Science, The University of Melbourne, Parkville 3052, Australia.

Alistair Moffat
Department of Computer Science, The University of Melbourne, Parkville 3052, Australia.


Status

IEEE Trans. Communications, 48(4):622-628, April 2000.

Abstract

We consider the problem of constructing and transmitting the codebook for Huffman coding. With careful organisation of the required operations, and an appropriate representation for the codebook, it is possible to make semi-static coding efficient even when $M$, the size of the source alphabet, is of the same magnitude as $m$, the length of the message being coded. The proposed structures are of direct relevance in applications that mimic one-pass operation through the use of semi-static compression on a block-by-block basis.

Software

An implementation is available.