Huffman Code

Unlike to ASCII or Unicode, Huffman code uses different number of bits to encode letters. If the number of occurrence of any character is more, we use fewer numbers of bits. Huffman coding is a method for the construction of minimum redundancy codes. Huffman coding assigns codes to characters such that the length of the code depends on the relative frequency or weight of the corresponding character. Huffman coding tree or Huffman tree is a full binary tree in which each leaf of the tree corresponds to a letter in the given alphabet. Define the weighted path length of a leaf to be its weight times its depth. The Huffman tree is the binary tree with minimum external path weight, i.e., the one with the minimum sum of weighted path lengths for the given set of leaves. So the goal is to build a tree with the minimum external path weight. Please refer to Optimal Merge Pattern in previous video lecture.