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Huffman Coding: Lossless Compression Explained

Huffman coding is a lossless data compression algorithm that assigns variable-length prefix codes to characters based on their frequencies, ensuring no ambiguity in decoding. The process involves building a Huffman Tree from input characters and their frequencies, using a min heap to prioritize nodes by frequency. The algorithm continues until only one node remains, which becomes the root of the complete Huffman Tree.

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Radha Rani
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10 views15 pages

Huffman Coding: Lossless Compression Explained

Huffman coding is a lossless data compression algorithm that assigns variable-length prefix codes to characters based on their frequencies, ensuring no ambiguity in decoding. The process involves building a Huffman Tree from input characters and their frequencies, using a min heap to prioritize nodes by frequency. The algorithm continues until only one node remains, which becomes the root of the complete Huffman Tree.

Uploaded by

Radha Rani
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Huffman Coding

Dr. Radha Rani


• Huffman coding is a lossless data compression algorithm.
• The idea is to assign variable-length codes to input characters, lengths
of the assigned codes are based on the frequencies of corresponding
characters.
• The variable-length codes assigned to input characters are Prefix
Codes, means the codes (bit sequences) are assigned in such a way
that the code assigned to one character is not the prefix of code
assigned to any other character.
• This is how Huffman Coding makes sure that there is no ambiguity
when decoding the generated bitstream.
• Let us understand prefix codes with a counter example.
• Let there be four characters a, b, c and d, and their corresponding
variable length codes be 00, 01, 0 and 1.
• This coding leads to ambiguity because code assigned to c is the prefix
of codes assigned to a and b.
• If the compressed bit stream is 0001, the de-compressed output may
be “cccd” or “ccb” or “acd” or “ab”.
There are mainly two major parts in
Huffman Coding
• Build a Huffman Tree from input characters.
• Traverse the Huffman Tree and assign codes to characters.
Steps to build Huffman Tree
• Input is an array of unique characters along with their frequency of occurrences
and output is Huffman Tree.
• Create a leaf node for each unique character and build a min heap of all leaf nodes
(Min Heap is used as a priority queue. The value of frequency field is used to
compare two nodes in min heap. Initially, the least frequent character is at root)
• Extract two nodes with the minimum frequency from the min heap.

• Create a new internal node with a frequency equal to the sum of the two nodes
frequencies. Make the first extracted node as its left child and the other extracted
node as its right child. Add this node to the min heap.
• Repeat steps#2 and #3 until the heap contains only one node. The remaining node
is the root node and the tree is complete.
Let us understand the algorithm
with an example:
• Step 1. Build a min heap that contains 6 nodes where each node
represents root of a tree with single node.
• Step 2 Extract two minimum frequency nodes from min heap. Add a
new internal node with frequency 5 + 9 = 14.

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