Analysis of the Limitations of Further Improvement of the Efficiency of VVC-CABAC

Abstract

Hybrid video compression plays an invaluable role in digital video transmission and storage services and systems. It performs several-hundred-fold reduction in the amount of video data, which makes these systems much more efficient. An important element of hybrid video compression is entropy coding of the data. The state-of-the-art in this field is the newest variant of the Context-based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC) entropy compression algorithm which recently became part of the new Versatile Video Coding (VVC) technology. This work is a part of research that is currently underway to further improve the CABAC technique. This paper provides analysis of the potential for further improvement of the CABAC by more accurate calculation of probabilities of data symbols. The CABAC technique calculates those probabilities by the use of idea of the two-parameters hypothesis. For the needs of analysis presented in this paper, an extension of the aforementioned idea was proposed which consists of three- and four-parameters hypothesis. In addition, the paper shows the importance of proper calibration of parameter values of the method on efficiency of data compression. Results of experiments show that for the considered in the paper variants of the algorithm improvement the possible efficiency gain is at levels 0.11% and 0.167%, for the three- and four-parameter hypothesis, respectively.