Variable-length Splittable Codes with Multiple Delimiters

Variable-length splittable codes are derived from encoding sequences of ordered integer pairs, where one of the pair’s components is upper bounded by some constant, and the other one is any positive integer. Each pair is encoded by the concatenation of two fixed independent prefix encoding functions applied to the corresponding components of a pair. The codeword of such a sequence of pairs consists of the sequential concatenation of corresponding pair’s encodings. We call such codes splittable. We show that Fibonacci codes of higher orders and codes with multiple delimiters of the form 011 . . . 10 are splittable. Completeness and universality of multi-delimiter codes are proved. Encoding of integers by multi-delimiter codes is considered in detail. For these codes, a fast byte aligned decoding algorithm is constructed. The comparative compression performance of Fibonacci codes and different multi-delimiter codes is presented. By many useful properties, multi-delimiter codes are superior to Fibonacci codes.