Fast Codes for Large Alphabets

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel coding scheme for large alphabet sources that groups low-probability symbols to enable faster encoding, applicable to both known and unknown source statistics.

Contribution

It proposes a new fast coding method for large alphabets by grouping symbols, improving encoding speed without sacrificing optimality.

Findings

The scheme effectively reduces encoding time for large alphabets.

It is applicable to sources with both known and unknown statistics.

The method maintains compression efficiency while speeding up coding.

Abstract

We address the problem of constructing a fast lossless code in the case when the source alphabet is large. The main idea of the new scheme may be described as follows. We group letters with small probabilities in subsets (acting as super letters) and use time consuming coding for these subsets only, whereas letters in the subsets have the same code length and therefore can be coded fast. The described scheme can be applied to sources with known and unknown statistics.