What is Huffman Coding / Entropy Coding?
Huffman coding is a method that takes symbols (e.g. bytes, DCT coefficients, etc.) and encodes them with variable length codes that are assigned according to statistical probabilities. A frequently-used symbol will be encoded with a code that takes up only a couple bits, while symbols that are rarely used are represented by symbols that take more bits to encode. A JPEG file contains up to 4 huffman tables that define the mapping between these variable-length codes (which take between 1 and 16 bits) and the code values (which is an 8-bit byte). Creating these tables generally involves counting how frequently each symbol (DCT code word) appears in an image, and allocating the bit strings accordingly. But, most JPEG encoders simply use the huffman tables presented in the JPEG standard. Some encoders allow one to optimize these tables, which means that an optimal binary tree is created which allows a more efficient huffman table to be generated. For a reasonable explanation of how it works
