Using bit recycling to reduce Knuth's balanced codes redundancy

Abstract

Donald Knuth published an efficient algorithm for constructing a code with balanced codewords. A balanced codeword is a codeword that contains an equal number of zero's and one's. The redundancy of the codes built using Knuth's algorithm is about twice the lower bound on redundancy. In this paper we propose a new scheme based on the bit recycling compression technique to reduce Knuth's algorithm redundancy. The proposed scheme does not affect the simplicity of Knuth's algorithm and achieves less redundancy. Theoretical results and an analysis of our scheme are presented as well.