Hardware implementation of HEVC CABAC binarization/de-binarization

Abstract

High efficiency video coding (HEVC) video codec applies different techniques in order to achieve high compression ratios and video quality that supports real-time applications. One of the critical techniques in HEVC is the Context adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC) which is type of entropy coding. CABAC comes at the cost of increased computational complexity, especially for parallelization and pipeline of these blocks: binarization, context modeling and binary arithmetic encoding. The Binarization (BZ) and de-Binarization (DBZ) methods are considered as important techniques in HEVC CABAC encoder and decoder respectively. Indeed, an important goal is to get high throughput in hardware architectures of CABAC BZ and DBZ in order to achieve high resolution applications. This work is the only one found on recent literature which focuses on design and implementation of full BZ and full DBZ compatible with H.265 and H.264. Consequently, a hardware architectures of BZ and DBZ are designed and implemented by using VHDL language, targeted an FPGA virtex4 xc4vsx25-12ff668 board and emulated with ModelSim. As a result, the implementation of BZ and DBZ can process 2 bins/cycle for each syntax element when operated at 697.83 MHz and 789.26 MHz, respectively. The proposed designs exhibits an improved high-throughput of 1395.66 Mbins/s for BZ and 1578.52 Mbins/s for the DBZ. The obtained Area Efficiencies in our proposed BZ and DBZ are about 0.544 Mbins/s/slices and 0.606 Mbins/s/slices, respectively, and it is better than many recent works.