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Huffman Coding

Huffman coding is a lossless data compression algorithm that uses variable-length codewords. It assigns shorter codewords to more common characters and longer codewords to less common characters. It builds a Huffman tree from the character frequencies and assigns codewords by traversing the tree. The time complexity of constructing the Huffman tree is O(nlogn) where n is the number of unique characters.

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225 views8 pages

Huffman Coding

Huffman coding is a lossless data compression algorithm that uses variable-length codewords. It assigns shorter codewords to more common characters and longer codewords to less common characters. It builds a Huffman tree from the character frequencies and assigns codewords by traversing the tree. The time complexity of constructing the Huffman tree is O(nlogn) where n is the number of unique characters.

Uploaded by

Rajni Parashar
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Huffman Coding-

 Huffman Coding is a famous Greedy Algorithm.


 It is used for the lossless compression of data.
 It uses variable length encoding.
 It assigns variable length code to all the characters.
 The code length of a character depends on how frequently it occurs in the given text.
 The character which occurs most frequently gets the smallest code.
 The character which occurs least frequently gets the largest code.
 It is also known as Huffman Encoding.

Prefix Rule-

 Huffman Coding implements a rule known as a prefix rule.


 This is to prevent the ambiguities while decoding.
 It ensures that the code assigned to any character is not a prefix of the code assigned to
any other character.

Major Steps in Huffman Coding-

There are two major steps in Huffman Coding-


1. Building a Huffman Tree from the input characters.
2. Assigning code to the characters by traversing the Huffman Tree.

Huffman Tree-

The steps involved in the construction of Huffman Tree are as follows-

Step-01:

 Create a leaf node for each character of the text.


 Leaf node of a character contains the occurring frequency of that character.

Step-02:

 Arrange all the nodes in increasing order of their frequency value.

Step-03:
Considering the first two nodes having minimum frequency,
 Create a new internal node.
 The frequency of this new node is the sum of frequency of those two nodes.
 Make the first node as a left child and the other node as a right child of the newly created
node.

Step-04:

 Keep repeating Step-02 and Step-03 until all the nodes form a single tree.
 The tree finally obtained is the desired Huffman Tree.

Time Complexity-

The time complexity analysis of Huffman Coding is as follows-


 extractMin( ) is called 2 x (n-1) times if there are n nodes.
 As extractMin( ) calls minHeapify( ), it takes O(logn) time.

Thus, Overall time complexity of Huffman Coding becomes O(nlogn).


Here, n is the number of unique characters in the given text.

Important Formulas-

The following 2 formulas are important to solve the problems based on Huffman Coding-

Formula-01:

Formula-02:

Total number of bits in Huffman encoded message


= Total number of characters in the message x Average code length per character
= ∑ ( frequencyi x Code lengthi )

PRACTICE PROBLEM BASED ON HUFFMAN CODING-


Problem-
A file contains the following characters with the frequencies as shown. If Huffman Coding is
used for data compression, determine-
1. Huffman Code for each character
2. Average code length
3. Length of Huffman encoded message (in bits)

Characters Frequencies

a 10

e 15

i 12

o 3

u 4

s 13

t 1

Solution-

First let us construct the Huffman Tree.


Huffman Tree is constructed in the following steps-

Step-01:
Step-02:

Step-03:

Step-04:

Step-05:
Step-06:

Step-07:

Now,
 We assign weight to all the edges of the constructed Huffman Tree.
 Let us assign weight ‘0’ to the left edges and weight ‘1’ to the right edges.

Rule
 If you assign weight ‘0’ to the left edges, then assign weight ‘1’ to the right
edges.
 If you assign weight ‘1’ to the left edges, then assign weight ‘0’ to the right
edges.
 Any of the above two conventions may be followed.
 But follow the same convention at the time of decoding that is adopted at
the time of encoding.

After assigning weight to all the edges, the modified Huffman Tree is-

Now, let us answer each part of the given problem one by one-

1. Huffman Code For Characters-

To write Huffman Code for any character, traverse the Huffman Tree from root node to the leaf
node of that character.
Following this rule, the Huffman Code for each character is-
 a = 111
 e = 10
 i = 00
 o = 11001
 u = 1101
 s = 01
 t = 11000

From here, we can observe-


 Characters occurring less frequently in the text are assigned the larger code.
 Characters occurring more frequently in the text are assigned the smaller code.

2. Average Code Length-

Using formula-01, we have-


Average code length
= ∑ ( frequencyi x code lengthi ) / ∑ ( frequencyi )
= { (10 x 3) + (15 x 2) + (12 x 2) + (3 x 5) + (4 x 4) + (13 x 2) + (1 x 5) } / (10 + 15 + 12 + 3 + 4
+ 13 + 1)
= 2.52

3. Length of Huffman Encoded Message-

Using formula-02, we have-


Total number of bits in Huffman encoded message
= Total number of characters in the message x Average code length per character
= 58 x 2.52
= 146.16
≅ 147 bits

To gain better understanding about Huffman Coding,


Watch this Video Lecture

To practice previous years GATE problems on Huffman Coding,


Watch this Video Lecture

Next Article- 0/1 Knapsack Problem


Get more notes and other study material of Design and Analysis of Algorithms.
Watch video lectures by visiting our YouTube channel LearnVidFun.
Summary

Article Name
Huffman Coding | Huffman Coding Example | Time Complexity
Description
Huffman Coding or Huffman Encoding is a Greedy Algorithm that is used for the lossless
compression of data. Huffman Coding Example and Time Complexity. Huffman Tree
Construction Steps.
Author
Akshay Singhal
Publisher Name
Gate Vidyalay
Publisher Logo

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