Editing Golomb coding (section)

== Rice coding ==

'''Rice coding''' (invented by [[Robert F. Rice]]) denotes using a subset of the family of Golomb codes to produce a simpler (but possibly suboptimal) prefix code.  Rice used this set of codes in an [[adaptive coding]] scheme; "Rice coding" can refer either to that adaptive scheme or to using that subset of Golomb codes.  Whereas a Golomb code has a tunable parameter that can be any positive integer value, Rice codes are those in which the tunable parameter is a power of two. This makes Rice codes convenient for use on a computer, since multiplication and division by 2 can be implemented more efficiently in [[binary arithmetic]].

Rice was motivated to propose this simpler subset due to the fact that geometric distributions are often varying with time, not precisely known, or both, so selecting the seemingly optimal code might not be very advantageous.

Rice coding is used as the [[entropy encoding]] stage in a number of lossless [[image compression]] and [[audio data compression]] methods.