We consider arithmetic coding as one of the most powerful forms of compression. It is now considered the method of choice for adaptive coding on multi-symbol alphabets because of its speed, low storage requirements, and effectiveness of compression. An evaluation of its performance will be discussed and its performance will be compared to another form of compression, namely, Huffman coding.
Introduction There are many different types of compression, some more efficient then others.
Arithmetic coding can be viewed as an extension of Huffman coding, a source short coding scheme which assigns less bits to high probability symbols and more bits to low probability symbols. The problem with Huffman coding is that it is ineffective on two-valued data because there is no codeword that is shorter than a single bit. Arithmetic coding however overcomes this limitation. It is a form of compression which uses real number intervals between numbers zero to one. There are two fundamentals in arithmetic coding.