Design of a High-Throughput CABAC Encoder

Abstract

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.