An efficient software implementation of the CAVLC encoder for H.264/AVC

Context Adaptive Variable-Length Coding (CAVLC) is employed by H.264/AVC for lossless encoding of quantized and predicted frames for compression gain. One of the most common methods for implementing CAVLC involves heavy reliance on look up tables (LUTs) to acquire a context adapted VLC. However the use of multiple LUTs results in large memory requirements for an embedded design. The largest LUT is used when the CAVLC encoder encodes the non-zero coefficients, called levels. To reduce memory requirements, a method for encoding levels without LUTs is proposed. In this paper, a simple realization of CAVLC in software is investigated and implemented for verification and validation testing.