Initialization

Because the adaptive Huffman code uses previously encoded symbols, an initialization problem arises at the beginning of the coding. At first the code tree is empty and does not contain symbols from already encoded data. To solve this, a suitable initialization has to be utilized. Among others the following options are available:

• A standard distribution will be used that is available at the encoder as well as the decoder.
• An initial code tree will be generated with a frequency of 1 for each symbol.
• A special control character will be added identifying new symbols following.

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