Tournament Coding of Integer Sequences
Jukka Teuhola · The Computer Journal · 2008
A new, simple non-statistical source coding technique for sequences of integers is suggested. The method is based on a tournament scheme, with the sequence arranged into pairs, where maxima (‘winners’) are encoded recursively, and minima are encoded by semi-fixed-length codes using the related maxima to bound the code lengths. In the experiments, tournament coding has outperformed the other non-statistical methods (gamma, delta, Fibonacci and interpolative coding) for uniform distribution of numbers. Also for non-uniform distributions the method is quite competitive.