Design and implementation of a low complexity lossless video codec

A low complexity lossless video codec design, which is an extension to the well known CALIC system, is presented. It starts with a reversible color space transform to decorrelate the video signal components. A gradient-adjusted prediction scheme facilitated with an error feedback mechanism follows to obtain the prediction value for each pixel. Finally, an adaptive Golomb-Rice coding scheme in conjunction with a context modeling technique to determine the K value adaptively is applied to encode the prediction errors faithfully. The proposed scheme exhibits a compression performance comparable to that of CALIC but with almost one half computing complexity. It also outperforms other well recognized schemes such as JPEG-LS scheme by 12% in compression ratio. A chip design using TSMC 0.18um technology was also developed. It features a throughput rate of 13.83 M pixels per second and a design gate count of 35 k plus 3.7 kB memory.