Length-Limited Variable-to-Variable Length Codes for High-Performance Entropy Coding

摘要

Arithmetic coding achieves a superior coding rate when encoding a binary source, but its lack of speed makes it an inferior choice when true high- performance encoding is needed. We present our work on a practical implemen- tation of fast entropy coders for binary messages utilizing only bit shifts and table lookups. To limit code table size we limit our code lengths with a type of variable-to-variable (VV) length code created from source string merging. We refer to these codes as 'merged codes'. With merged codes it is possible to achieve a desired level of speed by adjusting the number of bits read from the source at each step. The most efficcient merged codes yield a coder with a worst-case inefficiency of 0.4%, relative to the Shannon entropy. Using a hybrid Golomb-VV Bin Coder we are able to achieve a compression ratio that is competitive with other state-of-the-art coders, at a superior throughput.