Low Power Entropy Coding Hardware Design for H.264/AVC Baseline Profile Encoder

Low power hardware design for entropy coding of H.264/AVC baseline profile encoder is urgent for the increasing mobile applications. However, previous works are poor in the power performance. In this paper, the first low power context-based adaptive variable length coding (CAVLC) scheme named the side information aided (SIA) symbol look ahead (SLA) one-pass CAVLC is proposed, with the non-zero and abs-one SIA flags. A reconfigurable architecture for the SLA module is also proposed to support the low power CAVLC scheme efficiently. The resultant hardware power is reduced by 69% to only 3.7 mW at 27 MHz and 1.8 V for CIF-sized video coding. The total logic gate count is 27 K gates