Design of a High-Throughput CABAC Encoder

Chia-Cheng LO  Ying-Jhong ZENG  Ming-Der SHIEH  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E92-D   No.4   pp.681-688
Publication Date: 2009/04/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
DOI: 10.1587/transinf.E92.D.681
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Image Processing and Video Processing
Keyword: 
H.264,  CABAC,  entropy encoder,  high-throughput,  

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Summary: 
Context-based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding(CABAC) is one of the algorithmic improvements that the H.264/AVC standard provides to enhance the compression ratio of video sequences. Compared with the context-based adaptive variable length coding (CAVLC), CABAC can obtain a better compression ratio at the price of higher computation complexity. In particular, the inherent data dependency and various types of syntax elements in CABAC results in a dramatically increased complexity if two bins obtained from binarized syntax elements are handled at a time. By analyzing the distribution of binarized bins in different video sequences, this work shows how to effectively improve the encoding rate with limited hardware overhead by allowing only a certain type of syntax element to be processed two bins at a time. Together with the proposed context memory management scheme and range renovation method, experimental results reveal that an encoding rate of up to 410 M-bin/s can be obtained with a limited increase in hardware requirement. Compared with related works that do not support multi-symbol encoding, our development can achieve nearly twice their throughput rates with less than 25 % hardware overhead.