Research on a quasi-lossless compression algorithm based on huffman coding

A quasi-lossless compression algorithm for location information within civilian global positioning system (GPS) was proposed based on the analysis and comparison of performance between Huffman coding and arithmetic coding thus improving location data compression ratio and compression speed within civilian GPS accuracy. In the algorithm, predictive coding and Huffman coding were organically combined. Furthermore, this algorithm removed redundant information through compression preprocessing and secondary quantization. The coding efficiency improved with the use of predictive coding. Tests with an MSP430 microcontroller showed that compression ratio of the proposed algorithm was 87.1% and processing time is 31.4s when compression data amount reached 668kB, which coincided well with simulation results. Experimental results indicated that the proposed algorithm had low requirement for hardware resources after optimization and resulted in improved compression ratio and fast coding speed, which saved storage resources and communication cost for data transmission.