Arithmetic Coding is a form of entropy encoding used in lossless data compression. Unlike traditional methods such as Huffman coding, which assigns a fixed-length code to each symbol, arithmetic coding encodes an entire message into a single number in the interval . The process involves subdividing this range based on the probabilities of each symbol in the message: as each symbol is processed, the interval is narrowed down according to its cumulative frequency. For example, if a message consists of symbols , , and with probabilities , , and , the intervals for each symbol would be defined as follows:
This method offers a more efficient representation of the message, especially with long sequences of symbols, as it can achieve better compression ratios by leveraging the cumulative probability distribution of the symbols. After the sequence is completely encoded, the final number can be rounded to create a binary output, making it suitable for various applications in data compression, such as in image and video coding.
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