Abstract

Introduction Arithmetic coding is a method for data compression. Although the idea was developed in the 1970's, it wasn't until the publication of an "accessible implementation " [14] that it achieved the popularity it has today. Over the past ten years arithmetic coding has been refined and its advantages and disadvantages over rival compression schemes, particularly Hu#man [9] and Shannon-Fano [5] coding, have been elucidated. Arithmetic coding produces a theoretically optimal compression under much weaker assumptions than Hu#man and Shannon-Fano, and can compress within one bit of the limit imposed by Shannon's Noiseless Coding Theorem [13]. Additionally, arithmetic coding is well suited to adaptive coding schemes, both character and word based. For recent perspectives on the subject, see [10, 12]. The "accessible implementation" of [14] consisted of a 300 line C program, and much of the paper was a blow-by-blow description of the workings of the code. There was little in the way

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