Image Compression Using Huffman and Shannon-Fano Coding: Performance Evaluation

This paper studies Shannon-Fano coding versus Huffman coding as both are lossless compression techniques that bring out the difference in encoding symbols and performance. Shannon-Fano coding is simple but structured in method yet usually yields much worse compression. On the other hand, Huffman coding assigns code lengths based on symbol frequencies. As a result, Huffman coding yields higher compression ratios than Shannon-Fano coding. In this paper, we took a sample image and compressed its size using both Huffman and Shannon-Fano coding algorithms, and as a result, the image was compressed. Regarding compression, Huffman coding is more effective than Shannon-Fano coding since the output is observed to have a greater efficiency and the resulting file size is significantly less when compared to Shannon-Fano Coding.