A fastalgorithm for the uniquedecipherability of multivalued encodings

Multivalued encodings constitute an interesting generalization of ordinary encodings in that they allow each source symbol to be encoded by more than one codeword. In this paper the problem of testing the property of uniquedecipherability of multivalued encodings is considered. We provide an efficient algorithm whose time complexity is O(|C|Δ), where |C| is the number of codewords and Δ is the sum of their lengths. It is remarkable that the running time equals that of the fastestalgorithms for testing the much simpler property of uniquedecipherability of ordinary encodings