Level-compressed Huffman decoding

Based on the breadth-first search manner and the level-compression technique, this letter first presents a new array data structure to represent the classical Huffman tree. Then, the decoding algorithm is given. Both the memory and the decoding time required in the proposed method are less than those of previous methods. Some experimentations are carried out to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method. In fact, the proposed algorithm can be applied to the canonical Huffman tree.