It uses a tunable parameter b to divide a input value into two parts: the result of a division by b, and the remainder. The quotient is sent in unary coding, followed by the remainder in truncated binary encoding.
The parameter b is a function of the corresponding geometric distribution, which is parameterized by p = P(X = 0). b and p are related by these inequalities:
Rice coding is a special case of Golomb coding first described by Robert Rice. It is equivalent to Golomb coding where the tunable parameter is a power of two. This makes it extremely efficient for use on computers, since the division operation becomes a bitshift operation and the remainder operation becomes a bitmask operation.
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