Huffman coding - technical definition

A relatively simple entropy coding technique that assigns codes to symbols, such as characters in an alphabet, numbers in a numbering scheme, and punctuation marks, with the length of the code corresponding to the probability of the occurrence of the symbol.The technique was developed by David A. Huffman when he was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Huffman coding is the basis for Modified Huffman (MH), a run-length encoding compression technique. See also MH and run-length encoding.