Shannon-Fano Coding

At about 1960 Claude E. Shannon (MIT) and Robert M. Fano (Bell Laboratories) had developed a coding procedure to generate a binary code tree. The procedure evaluates the symbol's probability and assigns code words with a corresponding code length.

Compared to other methods the Shannon-Fano coding is easy to implement. In practical operation Shannon-Fano coding is not of larger importance. This is especially caused by the lower code efficiency in comparison to Huffman coding as demonstrated later.

Utilization of Shannon-Fano coding makes primarily sense if it is desired to apply a simple algorithm with high performance and minimum requirements for programming. An example is the compression method IMPLODE as specified e.g. in the ZIP format.