Title :
Huffman code efficiencies for extensions of sources
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci., Auckland Univ., New Zealand
Abstract :
The efficiency of noiseless coding may be improved by coding extensions of the source; for large extensions the efficiency is arbitrarily close to unity. The paper shows that the efficiency is not always improved just by coding the next extension. In some cases the code of a larger extension is markedly less efficient than its predecessor, although always within the theoretical limits of efficiency. The author shows how the phenomenon arises from changes to the Huffman coding tree as the source probabilities change and investigates it for binary and ternary codes.<>
Keywords :
Huffman codes; source coding; tree data structures; Huffman code efficiencies; Huffman coding tree; binary codes; noiseless coding; source extensions; source probabilities; ternary codes; Huffman coding;
Journal_Title :
Communications, IEEE Transactions on