The ultimate objective of source coding is to transform the data into a sequence of 0s and 1s that is indistinguishable from a fair bit stream, i.e., a sequence of independent and identically distributed (iid) equiprobable bits. Accordingly, most work on channel coding starts with the assumption that the data to be transmitted comes as a fair bit stream. On this web site we provide an implementation of half Huffman coding (halfHC), an algorithm that finds optimal prefix-free source codes that produce 1s with a frequency close to 0.5.

References

F. Altenbach, G. Böcherer, R. Mathar, Short Huffman Codes Producing 1s Half of the Time, presented at ICSPCS 2011, Honolulu.

Downloads

halfhc.tar: implementation of halfHC. It is tested in Matlab R2010b. Having the Communications System Toolbox installed is advantageous. Having the Optimization Toolbox installed is partially required. combn.m is provided in halfhc.tar.
Quotes.txt: the short English text to test halfHC.