A Branch-and-Bound Algorithm for the Construction of Reversible Variable Length Codes

Reversible variable length codes (RVLCs) have been extensively studied. In recent years, many new coding standards such as H.263 MPEG-4 and JPEG-2000 have adopted RVLCs to enhance their error resilient capability. This paper presents a novel algorithm that can construct efficient RVLCs. Distinct from previous Huffman-based schemes, the proposed algorithm employs the branch-and-bound strategy to generate RVLCs. This strategy not only improvesthe coding efficiency but also provides a flexible codeword selection. The experimental results show that the RVLCs obtained by our algorithm outperform all existing RVLCs.