Efficient error-limiting variable-length codes
Peter G. Neumann · IEEE Transactions on Information Theory · 1962
Variable-length codes recursively defined by certain sequential machines are investigated. It is seen that the recursive definition may be used to control error propagation as well as to provide a conceptually simple decoding procedure. Furthermore, the variety of these codes is such that the theoretical minimum average code-word length can be approached quite closely for many distributions. Methods for obtaining efficient codes are discussed, and examples are given.