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Abstract

Asymmetric Numeral Systems (ANS) is a class of entropy encoders that had an immense impact on the data compression, substituting arithmetic and Huffman coding. It was studied by different authors but the precise asymptotics of its redundancy (in relation to the entropy) was not completely understood. We obtain optimal bounds for the redundancy of the tabled ANS (tANS), the most popular ANS variant. Given a sequence \(a_1,a_2,\ldots,a_n\) of symbols from an alphabet \(\{0,1,\ldots,\sigma-1\}\) such that each symbol \(a\) occurs in it \(f_a\) times and \(n=2^r\), the tANS encoder using Duda's ``precise initialization'' to fill tANS tables transforms this sequence into a bit string of the following length (the frequencies are not included in the encoding): \(\sum\limits_{a\in[0..\sigma)}f_a\cdot\log\frac{n}{f_a}+O(\sigma+r)\), where \(O(\sigma+r)\) can be bounded by \(\sigma\log e+r\). The \(r\)-bit term is an artifact indispensable to ANS; the rest incurs a redundancy of \(O(\frac{\sigma}{n})\) bits per symbol. We complement this by examples showing that an \(\Omega(\sigma+r)\) redundancy is necessary. We argue that similar examples exist for most adequate initialization methods for tANS. Thus, we refute Duda's conjecture that the redundancy is \(O(\frac{\sigma}{n^2})\) bits per symbol. We also propose a variant of the range ANS (rANS), called rANS with fixed accuracy, parameterized by \(k\ge 1\). In this variant the integer division, which is unavoidable in rANS, is performed only when its result belongs to \([2^k..2^{k+1})\). Therefore, the division can be computed by faster methods provided \(k\) is small. We bound the redundancy for our rANS variant by \(\frac{n}{2^k-1}\log e+r\).

Details

1009240
Title
Efficiency of ANS Entropy Encoders
Publication title
arXiv.org; Ithaca
Publication year
2024
Publication date
Dec 8, 2024
Section
Computer Science; Mathematics
Publisher
Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
Source
arXiv.org
Place of publication
Ithaca
Country of publication
United States
University/institution
Cornell University Library arXiv.org
e-ISSN
2331-8422
Source type
Working Paper
Language of publication
English
Document type
Working Paper
Publication history
 
 
Online publication date
2024-12-10
Milestone dates
2022-01-07 (Submission v1); 2024-12-08 (Submission v2)
Publication history
 
 
   First posting date
10 Dec 2024
ProQuest document ID
2618382471
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/working-papers/efficiency-ans-entropy-encoders/docview/2618382471/se-2?accountid=208611
Full text outside of ProQuest
Copyright
© 2024. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.
Last updated
2024-12-11
Database
ProQuest One Academic