Memory Efficient Hierarchical Lookup Tables for Mass Arbitrary-Side Growing Huffman Trees Decoding

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems for video technology Vol. 18; no. 10; pp. 1335 - 1346
• Main Authors: WANG, Sung-Wen, WU, Ja-Ling, CHUANG, Shang-Chih, HSIAO, Chih-Chieh, TUNG, Yi-Shin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.10.2008; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Applied sciences; Audio/video decoding; Circuit properties; Code standards; Codec; Codecs; Coding, codes; Constraint optimization; Cost function; Data structures; Decoding; Electric, optical and optoelectronic circuits; Electronic circuits; Electronics; Entropy; Exact sciences and technology; Huffman decoding; Image processing; Information, signal and communications theory; Integrated circuits; Integrated circuits by function (including memories and processors); Lagrangian functions; Lookup tables; Memory; Optimization; Semiconductor electronics. Microelectronics. Optoelectronics. Solid state devices; Signal and communications theory; Signal convertors; Signal processing; Studies; Table lookup; Tables (data); Telecommunications and information theory; tree data structure; Tree data structures; Trees; Huffman decoding; Tree data structure; Audio/Video Decoding; Video coding; Performance evaluation; Audio/video decoding; Audio signal processing; Entropy; Tree structure; Decoding; Acoustic signal processing; Storage access; Optimization; Video signal processing; Search algorithm; Look up table; Viterbi code; Codec; Lagrange multiplier; Audio coding; Simulation; Storage management; Cost function; Metric; Data structure; tree data structure
• ISSN: 1051-8215; 1558-2205
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSVT.2008.920968

This paper addresses the optimization problem of minimizing the number of memory access subject to a rate constraint for any Huffman decoding of various standard codecs. We propose a Lagrangian multiplier based penalty-resource metric to be the targeting cost function. To the best of our knowledge, there is few related discussion, in the literature, on providing a criterion to judge the approaches of entropy decoding under resource constraint. The existing approaches which dealt with the decoding of the single-side growing Huffman tree may not be memory-efficient for arbitrary-side growing Huffman trees adopted in current codecs. By grouping the common prefix part of a Huffman tree, in stead of the commonly used single-side growing Huffman tree, we provide a memory efficient hierarchical lookup table to speed up the Huffman decoding. Simulation results show that the proposed hierarchical table outperforms previous methods. A Viterbi-like algorithm is also proposed to efficiently find the optimal hierarchical table. More importantly, the Viterbi-like algorithm obtains the same results as that of the brute-force search algorithm.