A Low-Cost VLC Implementation for MPEG-4

In this brief, a low-cost technique to implement variable-length coding (VLC) is presented. Instead of using a large codeword table as with most traditional methods, we employ two smaller tables, symbol-address table and section-based table, to encode input symbols. Compared with previous methods, our VLC implementation can reduce about 17% to 38% of memory space for storing larger VLC tables in MPEG-4 application. Synthesis results show that the proposed VLC encoder and decoder occupy 19761 and 20187 gate counts, respectively.