Prediction-based real-time CABAC decoder for high definition H.264/AVC

This paper proposes a prediction scheme to decode in real-time H.264/AVC bitstream coded in Context-based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC). The proposed scheme predicts the subsequent syntax element type, leading to a significant reduction in cycles invoked by the syntax element switching overhead that degrades the decoding performance significantly. In addition, a new pipelined architecture combined with the proposed scheme is presented for hardware implementation. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves a decoding performance of 1.2 cycles/bin, which releases the CABAC parsing from a bottleneck in decoding H.264 bitstream.