Accelerating the performance of stochastic encoding-based computations by sharing bits in consecutive bit streams

Stochastic encoding represents a value using the probability of ones in a random bit stream. Computation based on this encoding has good fault-tolerance and low hardware cost. However, one of its major issues is long processing time. We have to use a long enough bit stream to represent a value to guarantee that random fluctuations introduce only small errors to final computation results. For example, for most digital image processing algorithms, we need a 512-bit stream to represent an 8-bit pixel value stochastically to guarantee that the final computation error is less than 5%. To solve this issue, this paper proposes to share bits between adjacent bit streams to represent adjacent deterministic values. For example, in image processing applications, the bit stream which represents the current pixel value can share parts of the bits in the bit stream which represents the previous pixel value. We use an image contrast stretching algorithm to evaluate this method. Our experimental results show that the proposed methods can improve the performance by 90%.