Difference between revisions of "Huffman coding"
From ScienceZero
| Line 7: | Line 7: | ||
do | do | ||
Find the two smallest numbers in the histogram | Find the two smallest numbers in the histogram | ||
| − | Create a new node with the sum of the two | + | Create a new node with the sum of the two and a link to the two |
Mark the two originals as spent | Mark the two originals as spent | ||
loop until only one node remains | loop until only one node remains | ||
| + | |||
| + | We will now have a binary tree structure. | ||
Revision as of 03:04, 25 January 2011
A simple way of reducing the size of a block of data is to replace the most common words with shorter ones that are not already used in the data. It is possible to reconstruct the original data using a dictionary that lists the short words and the longer words they replace.
The problem is to decide which codes to use, David A. Huffman found the optimal way of generating codes that guarantees the shortest possible output.
Count the number of times each word occurs in the data, this will be a histogram do Find the two smallest numbers in the histogram Create a new node with the sum of the two and a link to the two Mark the two originals as spent loop until only one node remains
We will now have a binary tree structure.
