Byte-oriented decoding of canonical Huffman codes

Huffman codes or minimum-redundancy prefix codes is one of the most widespread compression techniques. Canonical codes are a subclass of Huffman codes. The canonical codes have a numerical sequence property, i.e. codewords with the same length are binary representations of consecutive integers. Once the length of the current codeword is known, it can be decoded by several arithmetic operations. The algorithm and data structure described in this work allow fast decoding of Huffman codes, that can be efficiently implemented without using bit operations