An area reduction scheme for the H.264/AVC CAVLC encoder

This paper presents an approach to reduce the area used for the implementation of look up tables (LUTs) in the H.264/AVC Context-based Adaptive Variable Length Coding (CAVLC) encoder. Replacing the LUTs of the coeff_token by an algorithm that closely follows the codeword features and can be easily implemented with simple computational elements, the proposed scheme shows that an area savings of more than 40% can be achieved with a bit-rate increase of less than 0.8%. The proposed approach is very effective to reduce the area for low bit-rate applications such as mobile video applications which have simple/low to moderate motion characteristics.