Efficient Decoding of Compressed Data

In this article, we discuss the problem of enhancing the speed of Huffman decoding. One viable solution to this problem is the multibit scheme which uses the concept of k-bit trees to decode up to k bits at a time. A linear-time optimal solution for the mapping of 2-bit trees into memory is presented. The optimal solution is derived by formulating the memory mapping problem as a binary string mapping problem and observing that at most four different 4-bit patterns can occur within any 2-bit Huffman tree. In addition to reducing the processing time of decoding, the optimal scheme is storage efficient, does not require changes to the encoding process, and is suitable for hardware implementations.