A Comparison Between Arithmetic and Huffman Coding Algorithms

Arithmetic and Huffman coding are two important algorithms which are used in multimedia compression. In this paper, we compare these two algorithms from performance, compression ratio, and implementation point of views for different text files with different capacities. Experimental results show that the compression ratio of the arithmetic coding is better than Huffman coding, while the performance of the Huffman coding is better than the arithmetic coding. In addition, from implementation point of view, implementation of Huffman coding is easier than the arithmetic coding.

Keywords:

Multimedia , Compression , Entropy Coding , Arithmeticand Huffman coding