Question

A Huffman table, in JPEG standard, is generated from a collection of statistics in two steps. One of the steps is implementing function/method given by this picture: (This picture is given in Annex K of JPEG standard):

Problem is here. Previously in standard (Annex C) says this sentence:

Huffman tables are specified in terms of a 16-byte list (BITS) giving the number of codes for each code length from
1 to 16. This is followed by a list of the 8-bit symbol values (HUFFVAL), each of which is assigned a Huffman code.

Obviously BITS is list of 16 elements. But in picture above, i is first set to 32 (i=32) then we want to access BITS[i]. Probably I misunderstood something, so please let someone gives me an answer.

Here is JPEG standard description of picture:
Figure K.3 gives the procedure for adjusting the BITS list so that no code is longer than 16 bits. Since symbols are paired
for the longest Huffman code, the symbols are removed from this length category two at a time. The prefix for the pair
(which is one bit shorter) is allocated to one of the pair; then (skipping the BITS entry for that prefix length) a code word
from the next shortest non-zero BITS entry is converted into a prefix for two code words one bit longer. After the BITS
list is reduced to a maximum code length of 16 bits, the last step removes the reserved code point from the code length
count.

Here is code for picture above:

void adjustBitLengthTo16Bits(vector<char>&BITS){
    int i=32,j=0;
    while(1){
        if(BITS[i]>0){
            j=i-1;
            j--;
            while(BITS[j]<=0)
                j--;
            BITS[i]=BITS[i]-2;
            BITS[i-1]=BITS[i-1]+1;
            BITS[j+1]=BITS[j+1]+2;
            BITS[j]=BITS[j]-1;
            continue;
        }
        else{
            i--;
            if(i!=16)
                continue;

            while(BITS[i]==0)
                i--;
            BITS[i]--;
            return;
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

This code is only for encoders that want to generate their own custom Huffman tables. The majority of JPEG encoders just use fixed tables that are reasonable approximations of the statistics of most images. In this particular case, the first step in generating a Huffman table for the AC coefficients produces a table up to 32 entries (bits) long. Since there are only 256 unique symbols to encode (skip/length pairs), there should never be more than 32 bits needed to specify all of the Huffman codes. After the first pass has produced a set of codes (up to 32-bits in length), the second pass takes the least frequent (longest) codes and “moves” them into shorter length slots so that the maximum code length is 16-bits. In an ideal Huffman table, the frequency distributions correspond to the code lengths. In this case, the table is being made to fit by squeezing the longest codes into slots reserved for shorter codes. This can be done because the 14/15/16 bit length Huffman codes have “room” for more permutations of bits and can “fit” the longer codes in them.

Update:
There is limited benefit to “optimizing” the Huffman tables in JPEG. Most of the compression occurs because of the quantization and DCT transform of the pixels. Switching to arithmetic coding has a measurable benefit (~10% size reduction), but then it limits the audience since most JPEG decoders don’t support arithmetic coding due to past patent issues.