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My understanding why arithmetic coding isn't used as much as Huffman coding is because of the patents that IBM had on arithmetic coding. I'm not familiar with a
by ixwt 3y ago
My understanding why arithmetic coding isn't used as much as Huffman coding is because of the patents that IBM had on arithmetic coding. I'm not familiar with any actively used compression algorithm that uses arithmetic coding.
I have explored using arithmetic coding on some data at work (mainly large amounts of XYZ points). My attempts did not work better than standard zip compression.
- zulban 3y agoHuh? I thought you cannot patent an algorithm, mathematical process, number, game design, etc.
- cesarb 3y ago> I'm not familiar with any actively used compression algorithm that uses arithmetic coding. I believe some popular video codecs use arithmetic coding (and IIRC, some other video codecs use the related range coding to avoid these patents).
- adgjlsfhk1 3y agoThe patents all expired in ~2013ish. ZSTD uses arithmetic encoding and is well on it's way to replacing gzip since it's usually faster and smaller.