Code Trees

A certain category of variable length codes can be represented by root trees. The structure of the tree defines the coding of the symbols regarded.

Code trees consist of interior nodes, leaf nodes and corresponding branches. Leaf nodes do not have a succeeding node and represent symbols, if the tree describes a prefix code. The path from the root to a leaf node defines the code word for the particular symbol assigned to this node.

Normally common compression methods use binary code trees. In that case a left branch represents a binary 0 and a right branch a binary 1.

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