Huffman Coding

Compressing a flag to 11 bits

The author designs a compact binary encoding scheme for national flags using a layered model and Huffman coding. Most flags can be represented in 55–76 bits by exploiting the statistical regularity of flag elements — stripes, stars, crescents, common aspect ratios — while allowing longer codes for complex outliers like Qatar.

Blog post · Data Compression · Algorithms · Encoding · Huffman Coding