Block Arithmetic Coding for Markov Sources

In a recent paper submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory [l], we introduced BAC. BAC is a variable to fixed block coder in that the input is parsed into variable length substrings which are encoded with fixed length output strings. Assume the input is taken from an alphabet with m symbols and the codebook has K codewords. With each input symbol, the encoder splits the set of codewords into m disjoint, nonempty subsets. The recursion continues until fewer than m codewords remain. One of these is transmitted, and the encoder reinitialized. The encoding process is described in Figure 1.