Survey of Advanced CABAC Accelerator Architectures for Future Multimedia
ARC '09 Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Reconfigurable Computing: Architectures, Tools and Applications
CABAC Accelerator Architectures for Video Compression in Future Multimedia: A Survey
SAMOS '09 Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
H.264/AVC offers critical advantages over other video compression schemes at the price of increased computational complexity. The efficiency of hardware video encoders depends on all modules embedded in the processing path. This paper presents the architecture of the H.264/AVC binary coder, which is the last stage of the video coder. The module conforms to H.264/AVC High Profile and supports two binary coding modes: context adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) and context adaptive variable-length coding (CAVLC). The architecture saves a considerable amount of hardware resources since two coding modes share the same logic and storage elements. Five versions of the arithmetic coding path are developed to study the area/performance tradeoff related to parallel symbol encoding. The implementation results show that the parallel symbol encoding allows higher efficiency. The whole architecture of the binary coder is described in VHDL and synthesized for different configurations to show the implementation cost of some coding options. For both CAVLC and CABAC modes, the architecture achieves the similar throughput able to support HDTV in real time.