An On-line Variable Length Binary Encoding

We present a methodology of an on-line variable-length binaryencoding of a set of integers. The basic principle of this methodology is
to maintain the prefix property amongst the codes assigned on-line to a
set of integers growing dynamically. The prefix property enables unique
decoding of a string of elements from this set. To show the utility of
this on-line variable length binary encoding, we apply this methodology to
encode the LZW codes. Application of this encoding scheme significantly
improves the compression achieved by the standard LZW scheme. This
encoding can be applied in other compression schemes to encode the
pointers using variable-length binary codes.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-95-39)