A Modified Version of Huffman Coding with Random Access Abilities

In this paper, a modified version of canonical Huffman coding is presented, such that a certain level of random access on the compressed file is allowed. Compared with the prior methods, the proposed approach does not need additional space to store the auxiliary information. Thus, it is possible to provide a certain level of random access ability on a compressed file whose size is close to the Huffman coding asymptotically. To our knowledge, this is the first method to possess random access ability without the help by the auxiliary data. Though the Huffman coding is discussed in this paper, the present method can be applied on any variable-length prefix encoding.