Chapter 3

Multimedia Data Compression

3.1 Lossless and Lossy compression
3.2 Entropy coding
3.3 Huffman coding
3.4 Adaptive coding
3.5 Dictionary-based coding (LZW)
3.1 Lossless and Lossy compression
• Compression: the process of coding that will effectively reduce the
total number of bits needed to represent certain information.

Fig 3.1 A general data compression scheme

• We call the output of the encoder codes or codewords.
• The intermediate medium could either be data storage or a
communication/computer network.
• If the compression and decompression processes induce no
information loss, the compression scheme is lossless; otherwise, it is
lossy.
 B0
compression ratio =
B1
B0 – number of bits before compression
B1 – number of bits after compression

• In general, we would desire any codec (encoder/decoder scheme) to

have a compression ratio much larger than 1.0.
• The higher the compression ratio, the better the lossless compression
scheme, as long as it is computationally feasible.
3.2 Entropy coding
• The entropy η of an information source with alphabet S = {s1, s2, . . . , sn} is:
n
1
 = H ( S ) =  pi log 2
i =1 pi
n
= − pi log 2 pi
i =1

• pi – probability that symbol si will occur in S.

1
• log
– indicates the amount of information contained in si, which
2 pi
corresponds to the number of bits needed to encode si.
• The definition of entropy is aimed at identifying often-occurring
symbols in the datastream as good candidates for short codewords in
the compressed bitstream.
• We use a variable-length coding scheme for entropy coding—
frequently occurring symbols are given codes that are quickly
transmitted, while infrequently occurring ones are given longer codes.
• For example, E occurs frequently in English, so we should give it a
shorter code than Q, say.
• If we use to denote the average length (measured in bits) of the
codewords produced by the encoder, the Shannon Coding Theorem
states that the entropy is the best we can do (under certain
conditions):

• Coding schemes aim to get as close as possible to this theoretical

lower bound.
3.3 Huffman coding
• Huffman coding is an efficient method of compressing data without
losing information.
• Huffman coding provides an efficient, unambiguous code by analyzing
the frequencies that certain symbols appear in a message.
• Symbols that appear more often will be encoded as a shorter-bit
string while symbols that aren't used as much will be encoded as
longer strings.
• There are mainly two major parts in Huffman Coding
1) Build a Huffman Tree from input characters.
2) Traverse the Huffman Tree and assign codes to characters.
Algorithm
1. Initialization: put all symbols on the list sorted according to their
frequency counts.
2. Repeat until the list has only one symbol left.
a) From the list, pick two symbols with the lowest frequency counts. Form a
Huffman subtree that has these two symbols as child nodes and create a
parent node for them.
b) Assign the sum of the children’s frequency counts to the parent and insert
it into the list, such that the order is maintained.
c) Delete the children from the list.
3. Assign a codeword for each leaf based on the path from the root.
Properties of Huffman coding
1. Unique Prefix Property: No Huffman code is a prefix of any other
Huffman code - precludes any ambiguity in decoding.
2. Optimality: minimum redundancy code - proved optimal for a given
data model (i.e., a given, accurate, probability distribution):
a) The two least frequent symbols will have the same length for their Huffman
codes, differing only at the last bit.
b) Symbols that occur more frequently will have shorter Huffman codes than
symbols that occur less frequently.
c) The average code length for an information source S is strictly less than η +
1.
l   +1
Example:
• Suppose the string below is to be sent over a network.

• Each character occupies 8 bits. There are a total of 15 characters in

the above string. Thus, a total of 8*15 = 120 bits are required to send
this string.
• Using the Huffman Coding technique, we can compress the string to a
smaller size.
• Huffman coding first creates a tree using the frequencies of the
character and then generates code for each character.
• Once the data is encoded, it has to be decoded. Decoding is done
using the same tree.
Huffman coding is done with the help of the following steps.
1. Calculate the frequency of each character in the string.

2. Sort the characters in increasing order of the frequency. These are

stored in a priority queue Q.

3. Make each unique character as a leaf node.

4. Create an empty node z. Assign the minimum frequency to the left
child of z and assign the second minimum frequency to the right
child of z. Set the value of the z as the sum of the above two
minimum frequencies.

5. Remove these two minimum frequencies from Q and add the sum
into the list of frequencies (* denote the internal nodes in the figure
above).
6. Insert node z into the tree.
7. Repeat steps 3 to 5 for all the characters.

(a) (b)
8. For each non-leaf node, assign 0 to the left edge and 1 to the right
edge.
• For sending the above string over a network, we have to send the
tree as well as the above compressed-code. The total size is given by
the table below.

• Without encoding, the total size of the string was 120 bits. After
encoding the size is reduced to 32+15+28 = 75 bits.
Decoding the code
• For decoding the code, we can take the code and traverse through
the tree to find the character.
• Let 101 is to be decoded, we can traverse from the root as in the
figure below.
3.4 Adaptive coding
• The Huffman algorithm requires prior statistical knowledge about the
information source, and such information is often not available.
• This is particularly true in multimedia applications, where future data
is unknown before its arrival, as for example in live (or streaming)
audio and video.
• Even when the statistics are available, the transmission of the symbol
table could represent heavy overhead.
• The solution is to use adaptive compression algorithms, in which
statistics are gathered and updated dynamically as the datastream
arrives. The probabilities are no longer based on prior knowledge but
on the actual data received so far.
• The new coding methods are “adaptive” because, as the probability
distribution of the received symbols changes, symbols will be given
new (longer or shorter) codes.
• This is especially desirable for multimedia data, when the content
(the music or the color of the scene) and hence the statistics can
change rapidly.
Adaptive Huffman coding
Procedures:
• Initial_code assigns symbols with some initially agreed-upon
codes, without any prior knowledge of the frequency counts for
them. For example, some conventional codes such as ASCII may be
used for coding character symbols.
• update_tree is a procedure for constructing an adaptive Huffman
tree. It basically does two things: it increments the frequency counts
for the symbols (including any new ones), and updates the
configuration of the tree.
Example
Adaptive Huffman Coding for Symbol String AADCCDD

Initial code assignment for AADCCDD using adaptive Huffman coding

• Let us assume that the initial code assignment for both the encoder
and decoder simply follows the ASCII order for the 26 symbols in an
alphabet, A through Z, as the table above shows.
• To improve the implementation of the algorithm, we adopt an
additional rule: if any character/symbol is to be sent the first time, it
must be preceded by a special symbol, NEW. The initial code for NEW
is 0. The count for NEW is always kept as 0 (the count is never
increased); hence it is always denoted as NEW:(0)
• It is important to emphasize that the code for a particular symbol
often changes during the adaptive Huffman coding process. The more
frequent the symbol up to the moment, the shorter the code.
• For example, after AADCCDD, when the character D overtakes A as
the most frequent symbol, its code changes from 101 to 0. This is of
course fundamental for the adaptive algorithm—codes are reassigned
dynamically according to the new probability distribution of the
symbols.
3.5 Dictionary-based coding (LZW)
• LZW(Lempel-Ziv-Welch) employs an adaptive – dictionary based
compression technique. Unlike variable- length coding, in which the
length of code words are different, LZW uses fixed- length codeword
to represent variable-length strings of symbols/characters that
commonly occur together, such as words in English text.
• The LZW encoder and decoder build up the same dictionary
dynamically while receiving the data.
• LZW places longer and longer repeated entries into a dictionary, and
then emits the code for an element, rather than the string itself, if the
element has already been placed in the dictionary.
Algorithm:
Example
LZW Compression for String ABABBABCABABBA
• Let us start with a very simple dictionary (also referred to as a string
table), initially containing only three characters, with codes as follows:

• Now if the input string is ABABBABCABABBA, the LZW compression

algorithm works as follows:
• The output codes are 1 2 4 5 2 3 4 6 1. Instead of 14 characters, only 9
codes need to be sent. If we assume each character or code is
transmitted as a byte, that is quite a saving (the compression ratio
would be 14/9 = 1.56).
• LZW is an adaptive algorithm, in which the encoder and decoder
independently build their own string tables. Hence, there is no
overhead involving transmitting the string table.