Huffman coding (redirected from Data compression/Huffman coding)

Huffman coding

A statistical compression method that converts characters into variable length bit strings. Most-frequently occurring characters are converted to shortest bit strings; least frequent, the longest. Compression takes two passes. The first pass analyzes a block of data and creates a tree model based on its contents. The second pass compresses the data via the model. Decompression decodes the variable length strings via the tree. See LZW.

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(algorithm)

Huffman coding - 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.