High throughput entropy decoder design for H.265/HEVC

Abstract

The H.265/high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard employs context-based adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) as a single entropy coding method. Despite the high coding efficiency of CABAC, its context modeling process limits the throughput and prevents effective parallelization, particularly at the decoder. In this paper, we design a new joint rate distortion-decoding complexity (RDDC) cost function to improve the throughput performance at the H.265/HEVC decoder side. The proposed RDDC cost function includes the complexity term based on a newly designed complexity model using the linear regression. Experimental results show that the proposed method reduces the number of context-coded bins up to 19.8 % without significant coding loss.