📦 Canonical Huffman File Compressor

A lossless file compression and decompression system implemented in C++ using Canonical Huffman Coding. The project compresses text and binary files through bit-level encoding while storing only the required metadata for efficient reconstruction during decompression.

🎯 Problem Statement

Many files contain redundant information that increases storage requirements. This project reduces file size by implementing Canonical Huffman Coding, a deterministic variant of Huffman Coding that stores only code lengths in the file header. During decompression, the canonical codes are reconstructed to recover the original file without any data loss.

✨ Features

• Lossless file compression and decompression
• Canonical Huffman Coding implementation
• Bit-level encoding and decoding
• Compact header representation
• Binary file support
• Supports TXT, PDF and JPG files
• Compression statistics (size, ratio and execution time)
• Modular Object-Oriented design
• Efficient binary file handling

⚙️ Tech Stack

• C++
• Standard Template Library (STL)
• Priority Queue
• Binary Trees
• Greedy Algorithms
• Bit Manipulation
• Binary File I/O
• Object-Oriented Programming

🏗️ Workflow

Input File │ ▼ Frequency Counter │ ▼ Huffman Tree │ ▼ Canonical Huffman Codes │ ▼ Header + Bit Writer │ ▼ Compressed File (.huff) │ ▼ Header Reader │ ▼ Canonical Decoder │ ▼ Bit Reader │ ▼ Original File

📂 Project Structure

Canonical-Huffman-File-Compressor/ │ ├── Compressor.cpp ├── Decompressor.cpp ├── FrequencyCounter.h ├── HuffmanTree.h ├── CanonicalHuffman.h ├── HeaderWriter.h ├── HeaderReader.h ├── BitWriter.h ├── BitReader.h ├── CanonicalDecoder.h │ ├── SampleFiles/ │ ├── sample.txt │ ├── sample.pdf │ └── sample.jpg │ ├── README.md ├── LICENSE └── .gitignore

▶️ Compilation

bash g++ Compressor.cpp -o compressor g++ Decompressor.cpp -o decompressor

▶️ Execution

Compress

bash ./compressor

Decompress

bash ./decompressor

📊 Sample Output

TXT File

PDF File

JPG File

💡 Key Concepts Demonstrated

• Huffman Coding
• Canonical Huffman Coding
• Greedy Algorithms
• Priority Queue
• Binary Trees
• Bit Manipulation
• Binary File Processing
• Binary File I/O
• Data Compression
• Header Encoding
• Object-Oriented Programming
• STL

🚀 Future Improvements

• Command-line file selection
• GUI-based application
• Multi-file archive support
• Hybrid LZ77 + Huffman compression
• Parallel compression for large files