Search in: Word
Vietnamese keyboard: Off
Virtual keyboard: Show
Computing (FOLDOC) dictionary
Huffman coding
Jump to user comments
algorithm A data compression technique which varies the
length of the encoded symbol in proportion to its information
content, that is the more often a symbol or token is used, the
shorter the binary string used to represent it in the
compressed stream. Huffman codes can be properly decoded
because they obey the prefix property, which means that no
code can be a prefix of another code, and so the complete set
of codes can be represented as a binary tree, known as a
Huffman tree. Huffman coding was first described in a seminal
paper by D.A. Huffman in 1952.