• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.26-32
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• 2008

Video compression schemes have been developed and used for many years. Currently, H.264/AVC is the most efficient video coding standard. The H.264/AVC baseline profile adopts CAVLC(Context-Adaptive Variable Length Coding) method as an entropy coding method. CAVLC gives better performance in compression ratios than conventional VLC(Variable Length Coding). However, because CAVLC decoder uses a lot of VLC tables, the CAVLC decoder requires a lot of area in terms of hardware. Conversely, since it must look up the VLC tables, it gives a worse performance in terms of software. In this paper, we propose a new hierarchical grouping method for the VLC tables. We can obtain an index of codes in the reconstructed VLC tables by simple arithmetic operations. In this method, the VLC tables are accessed just once in decoding a symbol. We modeled the proposed algorithm in C language, compiled under ARM ADS1.2 and simulated it with Armulator. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm reduces execution time by about 80% and 15% compared with the H.264/AVC reference program JM(Joint Model) 10.2 and the arithmetic operation algorithm which is recently proposed, respectively.