Huffman Coding

The Huffman coding is a procedure to generate a binary code tree. The algorithm invented by David Huffman in 1952 ensures that the probability for the occurrence of every symbol results in its code length.

As far as known the Huffman coding is not covered by patents. A detailled description of the different types of Huffman coding and some expamples will be found in a special subject block:

Huffman Coding []

Example Huffman Tree []

Construction of a Huffman Tree []

Adaptive Huffman Coding []

Huffman codes are part of several data formats as ZIP, GZIP and JPEG. Normally the coding is preceded by procedures adapted to the particular contents. For example the wide-spread DEFLATE algorithm as used in GZIP or ZIP previously processes the dictionary based LZ77 compression.