In many image sequence compression applications, Huffman coding is used to reduce statistical redundancy in quantized transform coefficients. The Huffman codeword table is often pre-defined to reduce coding delay and table transmission overhead. Local symbol statistics, however, may be much different from the global one manifested in the pre-defined table. In this paper, we propose a dynamic Huffman coding method which can adaptively modify the given codeword and symbol association according to the local statistics. Over a certain set of blocks, local symbol statistics is observed and used to re-associate the symbols to the codewords in such a way that shorter codewords are assigned to more frequency symbols. This modified code table is used to code the next set of blocks. A parameter is set up so that the relative degree of sensitivity of the local statistics to the global one can be controlled. By performing the same modification to the code table using the decoded symbols, it is possible to keep up with the code table changes in receiving side. The code table modification information need not be transmitted to the receiver. Therefore, there is no extra transmission overhead in employing this method.

Date Published: 16 September 1994
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 2308, Visual Communications and Image Processing '94, (16 September 1994); doi: 10.1117/12.185919

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 2308:
Visual Communications and Image Processing '94
Aggelos K. Katsaggelos, Editor(s)