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HUFFMAN EFFICIENCY



We can compare the efficiency of the Huffman algorithm to the theoretical maximum compression based on the zeroth order entropy.

Compression Ratios for the Lysozyme Single Crystal Data
ztyl01.pmi Predictors
1 2 3 4
Entropy Compression 3.25 3.45 3.39 3.44
Huffman Comprresion (*) 3.22 3.41 3.36 3.40
Huffman Efficiency 99.2% 98.9% 99.0% 98.9%

Compression Ratios for the Olivine Powder Data
olivine.image Predictors
1 2 3 4
Entropy Compression 2.18 2.28 2.22 2.25
Huffman Compression (*) 2.02 2.12 2.05 2.08
Huffman Efficiency 92.4% 93.0% 92.6% 92.7%

(*) Modified Huffman coding with a fixed symbol table size of 256 symbols was used.

The poorer efficiency with the olivine data is a combination of the hight frequency on 0 values and a result of the symbol table being too small. (imgCIF / CBF will allow the number of symbols stored to be a variable size, but we still need an algortihm which can determine an optimum or close to optimum number of symbols.)