: A new data structure is investigated, which allows fast decoding of texts encoded by canonical Huffman codes. The storage requirements are much lower than for conventional Huffman trees, O(log 2 n) for trees of depth O(log n), and decoding is faster, because a part of the bit-comparisons necessary for the decoding may be saved. Empirical results on large real-life distributions show a reduction of up to 50% and more in the number of bit operations. The basic idea is then generalized, yielding further savings. This is an extended version of a paper which has been presented at the 8th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM'97), and appeared in its proceedings, pp. 65--75. -- 1 -- 1.

Several measures are defined and investigated, which allow the comparison of codes as to their robustness against errors. Then new universal and complete sequences of variable-length codewords are proposed, based on representing the integers in a binary Fibonacci numeration system. Each sequence is constant and need not be generated for every probability distribution. These codes can be used as alternatives to Huffman codes when the optimal compression of the latter is not required, and simplicity, faster processing and robustness are preferred. The codes are compared on several "real-life" examples. 1. Motivation and Introduction Let A = fA 1 ; A 2 ; \Delta \Delta \Delta ; An g be a finite set of elements, called cleartext elements, to be encoded by a static uniquely decipherable (UD) code. For notational ease, we use the term `code' as abbreviation for `set of codewords'; the corresponding encoding and decoding algorithms are always either given or clear from the context. A code i...

Recently, the use of the Burrows-Wheeler method for data compression has been expanded. A method of enhancing the compression efficiency of the common JPEG standard is presented in this paper, exploiting the Burrows-Wheeler compression technique. The paper suggests a replacement of the traditional Huffman compression used by JPEG by the Burrows-Wheeler compression. When using high quality images, this replacement will yield a better compression ratio. If the image is synthetic, even a poor quality image can be compressed better.