High speed pattern matching for a fast Huffman decoder

Abstract

The fast Huffman decoding algorithm has been used in JPEG, MPEG and image data compression standards, etc. And code compression is a key element in high speed digital data transport. A major compression is performed by converting the fixed-length codes to variable-length codes through an entropy coding scheme. Huffman coding combined with run-length coding is shown to be a very efficient coding scheme. To speed up the process of search for a symbol in a Huffman tree and to reduce the memory size we have proposed a tree clustering and a pattern matching algorithm to avoid high sparsity of the tree. The method is shown to be very efficient in memory size and fast searching for the symbol. For an experimental video data with Huffman codes extended up to 16 bits in length, i.e. it is used for the standard JPEG, the result of experiments show that the proposed algorithm has a very high speed and performance. The design of the decoder is carried out using silicon-gate CMOS process. >