A new coeff-token decoding method with efficient memory access in H.264/AVC video coding standard

Abstract

In general, a large amount of memory accesses are required for context-based adaptive variable-length coding decoding in H.264/AVC standard. It is a serious problem for applications such as videophone and digital multimedia broadcasting services because of the considerable power consumption of the memory access function. In order to reduce the memory access, we carefully examined the codewords in variable-length code tables (VLCTs) of the coeff-token and found some distinctive features from the structure of codewords. Based on the features, a new coeff-token decoding method with an efficient memory organization is proposed in this paper. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves an approximately 95% memory access saving without video-quality degradation, compared with conventional decoding.