A Method for the Construction of Minimum-Redundancy Codes

Huffman, D. (1952). A Method for the Construction of Minimum-Redundancy Codes. Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers, 40(9), 1098-1101.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1952

Volume

40

Issue

9

Pages

1098-1101

DOI

10.1109/jrproc.1952.273898

DOI registrant

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Link

https://doi.org/10.1109/JRPROC.1952.273898

Cited from

information_theory, philosophy

Cited by

3 citations across 3 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Compression
  • and its statistical or structural properties; (2) the loss discipline — lossless (exact reconstruction, bounded by entropy) or lossy (controlled fidelity loss, subject to distortion-rate tradeoffs); (3) the algorithm — entropy coding (Huffman, arithmetic, ANS)

    This sourceThe optimal prefix-code (Huffman) construction by greedy bottom-up merging of lowest-probability symbols. SUPPORTS markers 168 (canonical reference, Notes), 170 (entropy coding: Huffman), and 172 (Huffman's 1952 prefix code). DOI verified.

    Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract

    The work's own abstract states it develops an optimum minimum-redundancy coding method, grounding the Huffman-coding reference; it does not itself state prefix-code structure or canonicity.

    “An optimum method of coding an ensemble of messages consisting of a finite number of members is developed. A minimum-redundancy code is one constructed in such a way that the average number of coding digits per message is minimized.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

• Parsimony (Occam's Razor)
  • Complexity measure: Kolmogorov complexity K(h) — the length of the shortest description of h. (Related to classical compression methods

    This sourceHuffman optimal prefix-code algorithm.

Domain-specific

• Variable-Length Encoding
  • Huffman's primary result gives a canonical example of variable-length design, but Variable-Length Encoding is broader than Huffman Coding.

Verification

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 1 of 3 citations: 1 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.

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See how references were verified.

Registry ID ref:d01d245e24cc · see in the full table