• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.30 no.5C
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• pp.382-390
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• 2005

Huffman codes are widely used for image and video data transmission. As the increase of real-time data, a lot of studies on effective decoding algorithms and architectures have been done. In this paper, we proposed a balanced binary search tree for Huffman decoding and compared the performance of the proposed architecture with that of previous works. Based on definitions of the comparison of codewords with different lengths, the proposed architecture constructs a balanced binary tree which does not include empty internal nodes, and hence it is very efficient in the memory requirement. Performance evaluation results using actual image data show that the proposed architecture requires small number of table entries, and the decoding time is 1, 5, and 2.41 memory accesses in minimum, maximum, and average, respectively.