Implementation of High Performance CAVLC for H.264/AVC Video Codec

Context-based adaptive variable length coding (CAVLC) is entropy coding for H.264/AVC video codec. Since the CAVLC is highly context-adaptive and of a block-based context formation, high coding efficiency is achieved. However, its high complexity causes various difficulties in full-hardware implementation. This paper presents high performance hardware architecture of CAVLC. The proposed architecture is implemented in a FPGA device, and verified by RTL simulations. The implementation results show that the proposed architecture encodes a 4times4 block per 16 clock cycles, and achieves a real-time processing for 1920times1088 frame size with 30-fps video at 100MHz clock speed