Synchronization of binary source codes (Corresp.)

Abstract

The problem of achieving synchronization for variable-length source codes is addressed through the use of self-synchronizing binary prefix-condition codes. Although our codes are suboptimal in the sense of minimum average codeword length, they have the advantages of being generated by an explicit constructive algorithm, having minimal additional redundancy compared with optimal codes-as little as one additional bit introduced into the least likely codeword for a large class of sources-and having statistical synchronizing performance that improves on that of the optimal code in many cases.