An On-line Variable Length Binary Encoding

Abstract

We present a methodology of an on-line variable-length binary encoding of a set of integers. The basic principle of this methodology is to maintain the prefix property amongst the codes assigned on-line to a set of integers growing dynamically. The prefix property enables unique decoding of a string of elements from this set. To show the utility of this on-line variable length binary encoding, we apply this methodology to encode the LZW codes. Application of this encoding scheme significantly improves the compression achieved by the standard LZW scheme. This encoding can be applied in other compression schemes to encode the pointers using variable-length binary codes. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-95-39)