Evolution and Advancement of Arithmetic Coding over Four Decades

Arithmetic Coding (AC) is a form of entropy encoding used in lossless data compression. It is a well-known, state of the art technique, in which the frequently seen symbols are encoded with fewer bits than rarely seen symbols. It has been widely used since last four decades. Many researchers worked on it to improve its performance and they successfully experimented with it. This technique has also been in use in combination with other techniques to gain surprising results. In this survey paper, an effort is made to recap a number of accomplishments from 1976 to 2017 regarding Arithmetic Coding. This study provides an insight for new researchers to know how this technique evolved with time and how major achievements were made using this technique. This paper gives a comparison of AC with another well-known technique named Huffman Coding. Comparison with its contemporary counterparts shows that it is better in performance almost in every situation.