Robust Source Coding with Generalised T-Codes

This thesis presents a range of novel and improved results in the area of source coding with T-Codes, based on a thorough review of the recursive structure of the T-Codes. T-Codes were introduced by Mark Titchener in 1984. They are variable-length codes, similar to the well-known Huffman codes and may thus be used for compression by source coding. T-Codes have also been noted for their self-synchronisation properties, which result from their recursive construction. This thesis reviews and formalises the theory of generalised T-Codes and their recursive construction. It extends an existing recursive storage concept, the binary depletion codes, as the "T-depletion codes". These are shown to provide a unique fixed-length representation for T-Codes, which may be used in a recursive encoder/decoder scheme for T-Codes. It is shown that the T-depletion code format accommodates unique representations for all proper prefixes of T-Code codewords, thus covering the complete state space of an enco..