Highly Scalable Parallel Arithmetic Coding on Multi-Core Processors Using LDPC Codes

We describe a highly scalable parallel arithmetic coder for Markov inputs suitable for implementation on modern multi-core processors. The algorithm divides the input into interleaved sub-sequences which can be then processed independently on different processing units using LDPC-based Slepian-Wolf coding. Experimental simulations show good scalability of the proposed algorithm while also maintaining good compression performance. Notably, when compared with traditional parallel arithmetic coding, the proposed method maintains a much higher efficiency both respect to the entropy limit as well as in terms of the ability to distribute computations across multiple cores without performance loss.