Huffman coding
In this chapter, we formally study the Huffman coding algorithms and apply the theory in Chapter 2.
4.1 Static Huffman coding
Huffman coding is a successful compression method used originally for text compression. In any text, some characters occur far more frequently than others. For example, in English text, the letters E, A, O, T are normally used much more frequently than J, Q, X.
Huffman’s idea is, instead of using a fixed-length code such as 8 bit extended ASCII or DBCDIC for each symbol, to represent a frequently occurring character in a source with a shorter codeword and to represent a less frequently occurring one with a longer codeword. Hence the total number of bits of this representation is significantly ...
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