Abstract
This chapter discusses a popular method of generating variable length codes called “arithmetic coding.” Arithmetic coding is useful when dealing with sources with small alphabets, such as binary sources and alphabets with highly skewed probabilities. It is also very useful approache when the modeling and coding aspect of lossless compression are to be kept separate. This chapter explores the basic ideas behind the arithmetic coding, highlights some of the properties of arithmetic codes, and describes an implementation. In arithmetic coding a unique identifier or tag is generated for the sequence to be encoded. This tag corresponds to a binary fraction, which becomes the binary code for the sequence. In practice, the generation of the tag and the binary code are the same process. In the first phase, a unique identifier or tag is generated for a given sequence of symbols. This tag is then given a unique binary code. A unique arithmetic code can be generated for a sequence of length m without the need for generating codewords for all sequences of length m.
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