Universal Source Coding

Abstract

The source compression codes of Huffman and Shannon–Fano–Elias are adapted to specific statistics of the source. If used in a different statistical environment, they loose their optimality (see Example 13.1.1). One is therefore led to investigate the existence of codes that are less, and hopefully not, sensitive to the source statistics. These codes are called universal. The following example gives an idea of what can be expected.