A partial parallel algorithm and architecture for arithmetic encoder in JPEG2000

For JPEG2000 real-time applications, embedded block coding with optimized truncation (EBCOT) is a time-consuming part and becoming a bottleneck for the entire system throughput. Since the arithmetic encoder (AE) is one part of EBCOT, low performance of AE can significantly degrade the performance. AE is inherently a serial process with high dependency and parallelization of AE is difficult. In this paper, a partial parallel algorithm for AE is proposed. One distinct characteristic of the proposed algorithm is that two contexts can be processed in one clock cycle. Based on the proposed algorithm, a pipelined architecture is implemented. Experimental results, with standard test image benchmarks, show that the proposed algorithm and architecture achieves about 24% improvement in the system throughput in comparison with the architecture based on the original AE algorithm.