Unary-prefixed encoding of lengths of consecutive zeros in bit vector
S. Xue, Bengt Oelmann · Electronics Letters · 2005
The unary-prefixed encoding (UPE) algorithm in coding the lengths of zeros in a bit vector is proposed. While the lengths of consecutive zeros in a bit vector can be mapped to integer sources with geometrical distribution (when the bits in the bit vector are independent from each other), the actual case is more often that the distributions are exponential, in a more real-world situation, with high peaks and heavier tails (when the bits in a bit vector are correlated). For the geometric distribution, the UPE code set can be proven to be optimal. For the integer sources with high peaks and heavier tails, the UPE almost always provides better compression compared to the existing suboptimal codes.