Fast renormalization for H.264/MPEG4-AVC arithmetic coding

We propose a fast, standard-compliant realization of the computationally expensive renormalization part of the binary arithmetic coder in H.264/MPEG4-AVC. Our technique allows to replace time-consuming, bitwise-operating input and output procedures as well as bitwise carry-over handling in a conventional implementation with corresponding operations in units of multiple bits. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method enables a considerable speed-up of both arithmetic encoding and decoding in the range of 24–53% of their corresponding run time.