Marlin: A High Throughput Variable-to-Fixed Codec Using Plurally Parsable Dictionaries

We present Marlin, a variable-to-fixed (VF) codec optimized for decoding speed. Marlin builds upon a novel way of constructing VF dictionaries that maximizes efficiency for a given dictionary size. On a lossless image coding experiment, Marlin achieves a compression ratio of 1.94 at 2494MiB/s. Marlin is as fast as state-of-the-art high-throughput codecs (e.g., Snappy, 1.24 at 2643MiB/s), and its compression ratio is close to the best entropy codecs (e.g., FiniteStateEntropy, 2.06 at 523MiB/s). Therefore, Marlin enables efficient and high throughput encoding for memoryless sources, which was not possible until now.