A FAST-ADAPTIVE HUFFMAN CODING ALGORITHM

The Huffman code in practice suffers from two problems: the prior know ledge of the probability distribution of the data source to be encoded is necessary, and the encoded data propagate errors. The first proble m can be solved by an adaptive coding, while the second problem can be partly solved by segmenting data into segments. But the adaptive Huff man code performs badly when segmenting data into relatively small seg ments because of its relatively slow adaptability. This paper offers a fast-adaptive coding algorithm which tracks the local data statistics more quickly, thus yielding better compression efficiency.