Huffman encoding
Quick Summary
Huffman encoding is a method used in computer science and telecommunications to reduce data redundancy, thereby enabling more efficient data transmission. This technique is a form of source encoding, where the goal is to represent digitized signals using the fewest possible bits.12
The effectiveness of Huffman codes relies on knowing the probabilities of different data levels or sequences. By assigning shorter binary codes to more frequent data and longer codes to less frequent data, Huffman encoding minimizes the average number of bits needed to represent the source. For example, if one data level occurs 50% of the time, it might be assigned a one-bit code, while less frequent levels receive longer codes. This approach is more efficient than standard binary encoding, which assigns a fixed number of bits to each level.2
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