Year: 2008
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Huffman coding finds an optimal prefix code for a given probability mass function. Consider situations in which one wishes to find an optimal code with the restriction that all codewords have lengths that lie in a user-specified set of lengths (or, equivalently, no codewords have lengths that lie in a complementary set). This paper introduces a polynomial-time dynamic programming algorithm that finds optimal codes for this reserved-length prefix coding problem. This has applications to quickly encoding and decoding lossless codes. In addition, one modification of the approach solves any quasiarithmetic prefix coding problem, while another finds optimal codes restricted to the set of codes with g codeword lengths for user-specified g (e.g., g = 2). For small enough g, a sublinear-time constant-space approach is even more efficient.
Author: Michael B. Baer
Language: English
Subfield: Theoretical Computer Science
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1586480211