Main Page |
Computer Maths |
Symbolic Data
Computer Maths : Symbolic Data
Sections 3 and 4 Preliminaries and Coding Symbol Data
- Huffman Coding
- Shannon-Fano Coding
Shannon-Fano coding
This is another approach very similar to Huffman coding. In fact, it is the first well-known coding method. It was proposed by C. Shannon (Bell Labs) and R. M. Fano (MIT) in 1940.
The Shannon-Fano coding algorithm also uses the probability of each symbol’s occurrence to construct a code in which each codeword can be of different length. Codes for symbols with low probabilities are assigned more bits, and the codewords of various lengths can be uniquely decoded.