Rice coding

Rice coding is a form of entropy coding invented by Robert Rice.

Rice coding is closely related to Golomb coding, and is useful when small values are vastly more common than large values.

It uses a tunable parameter to divide a binary input word into two parts: the value first part is then coded using base 1 coding as a string of 1s followed by a zero, and the second part is written as-is.

The tunable parameter can either be found by exhaustive search for each input set, or adjusted dynamically.