[Glean] Entropy Coding and Tunstall Coding

Published: June 14, 2020 by SingularityKChen (Last updated: June 14, 2020 )

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• Glean 44

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• Entropy 2
• Tunstall 2

• Entropy Coding and Tunstall Coding
  • Entropy Coding
  • Tunstall Coding

Entropy Coding and Tunstall Coding

Entropy Coding

An entropy encoding is a lossless data compression scheme that is independent of the specific characteristics of the medium.

Two of the most common entropy encoding techniques are Huffman coding and arithmetic coding.

Tunstall Coding¹

• Select the symbol with largest probability in the table. Call it S.
• Remove S and add the N substrings Sx where x goes over all the N symbols. This step increase the table size by N−1symbols (some of them may be substrings). Thus, after iteration k, the table size will be N + k(N − 1) elements.
• If N + k(N − 1) ≤ 2n, perform another iteration.

An important property of the Tunstall codes is their reliability. If one bit becomes corrupt, only one code will get bad. Normally, variable-size codes do not feature any reliability.

1. Salomon D. Data compression: the complete reference[M]. Springer Science & Business Media, 2004. ↩