Faster Algorithm for Designing Optimal Prefix-Free Codes with Unequal Letter Costs
Title:
Faster Algorithm for Designing Optimal Prefix-Free Codes with Unequal Letter Costs
Author:
Dumitrescu, Sorina
Appeared in:
Fundamenta informaticae
Paging:
Volume 73 (2006) nr. 1-2 pages 107-117
Year:
2006-08-28
Contents:
We address the problem of designing optimal prefix-free codes over an encoding alphabet with unequal integer letter costs. The most efficient algorithm proposed so far has O(n^{C+2}) time complexity, where n is the number of codewords and C is the maximum letter cost. For the special case when the encoding alphabet is binary, a faster solution was proposed, namely of O(n^C) time complexity, based on a more sophisticated modeling of the problem, and on exploiting the Monge property of the cost function. However, those techniques seemed not to extend to the r-letter alphabet. This work proves that, on the contrary, the generalization to the r-letter case is possible, thus leading to a O(n^C) time complexity algorithm for the case of arbitrary number of letters.
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