Variants of Golomb Coding and the n-ary Versions

Golomb coding is a type of entropy encoding scheme for geometric distributions. It consists of two parts, and both parts are coded with variable-length coding, which requires a higher computational effort than fixed-length coding schemes. To solve this issue, the first part of this article presents a variant of Golomb coding that uses fixed-length coding to code the first part. The simulations show that the proposed coding scheme has a higher throughput than Golomb coding, due to the reduction of arithmetic complexity. In the second part, we discuss the n-ary versions of Golomb coding and the proposed coding scheme.