A Memory-Efficient CAVLC Decoding Scheme for H.264/AVC

This paper presents a memory-efficient CAVLC decoding architecture for H.264/AVC. In the proposed architecture, not only the memory space is reduced for decoding the syntax elements such as coeff_token, total_zero, and run_before, but also the decode efficiency is improved. After the analysis of the decoding principle of the CAVLC, we simplify the coeff-token VLD table and propose a new coeff-token VLD based on arithmetic operation and the look-up table combination architecture. The run-before VLD can used the same principle as the proposed coeff-token VLD. Otherwise, the proposed scheme also adope the zero block skipping technique and multiple symbols decoding scheme when decoding SignTrail. The simulation results show that our system can run at 168MHz clock frequency and the average cycles for decoding one macro-block is 136 cycles. The proposed architecture can achieves an approximate 39-53% savings in memory access without video quality degrading.