Guaranteed Synchronization of Huffman Codes with Known Position of Decoder

In Huffman-encoded data a bit error may propagate arbitrarily long. This paper introduces a method for limiting such error propagation to at most $L$ bits, $L$ being a parameter. It is required that the decoder knows the bit number currently being decoded. The method utilizes the inherent tendency of Huffman codes to resynchronize spontaneously and does not introduce any redundancy if such a~resynchronization takes place. The method is applied to parallel decoding of Huffman data and is tested on Jpeg compression.