An SGH-tree based efficient Huffman decoding

Huffman code [D. A. Huffman, Sept. 1952] is the most well-known and widely used variable-length codes (VLCs) for compressing various kinds of data. Conventional table lookup and/or bit-serial decoding techniques for realizing VLCs are inefficient in memory usage and/or computation time. In this paper, we investigated some existing memory efficient VLC decoding methods [R. Hashemian, 1995], [K. L. Chung, 1997], [H. C. Chen, et al., 1999], [M. Aggarwal and A. Narayan, 2000] and gave some comments and comparisons among them. We also proposed an SGH-tree based data structure to implement Aggarwal's approach [M. Aggarwal and A. Narayan, 2000] such that a symbol can be decoded in constant time; moreover, the required memory is much smaller than that of the original approach.