huffman coding

1 definition found

huffman coding - Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (26 May 2007) :

  Huffman coding
  
     <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.
  
     (1994-12-23)