The construction of codes for infinite sets
Michael G. G. Laidlaw · South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists · 2004
Run-length encoding is used in applications that process digitised analogue data. Lossless image compression is an example. Golomb encoding is optimal for infinite geometric probability distributions. A wider class of codes is presented here, all of which are suitable for encoding the elements from an infinite set. It is shown that each code can be described by a polynomial K(L), which determines the number of codewords of length L. An even wider class of codes is also considered in which the number of codewords grows geometrically with their length. Criteria are given for excluding such codes from further consideration.