An A*-based algorithm for constructing reversible variable length codes with minimum average codeword length

  • Authors:

  • Yuh-Ming Huang;Ting-Yi Wu;Yunghsiang S. Han

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chi Nan University, Puli, Taiwan, R.O.C.;Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chiao-Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C. and Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chi Nan University, Puli;Dept. of Electrical Eng., National Taiwan Univ. of Science and Techn., Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C. and Inst. of Comm. Eng., National Taipei Univ., Taipei County and Dept. of Computer Science and Inf. E ...

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Communications
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Variable length codes (VLCs) are widely adopted in many compression standards due to their good coding efficiency on average codeword length. However, an inherent problem with a VLC is that an error of even one bit can cause serious error propagation and thus loss of synchronization at the receiver, which would lead to a series of non-correctly decoded symbols. Reversible variable length codes (RVLCs) were introduced to significantly mitigate this phenomenon. In this work, a method to find an optimal RVLC in terms of the minimum average codeword length is first formulated as a tree-searching problem, and then, instead of performing an exhaustive search, an A*-based construction algorithm is proposed to find an optimal RVLC. The proposed algorithm has been applied to several benchmarks for sources and has found respective optimal symmetric and asymmetric RVLCs.