Entropy Encoder Architectures for H.264/avc Baseline Profile

This paper presents the design of a hardware architecture for the Entropy Encoder of H.264/AVC video compression standard, considering the baseline profile. The entropy encoder is composed by two main blocks: Exp-Golomb encoder and CAVLC encoder. This paper presents the architectural design of these two blocks. The synthesis results targeting Xilinx FPGAs showed that the Exp-Golomb and CAVLC encoders reached a throughput of 10.2 million of samples per second for the Exp-Golomb encoder and of 117.62 million of samples per second for CAVLC encoder. The H.264/AVC baseline entropy encoder is being designed through the integration of these two encoders and preliminary results indicate that this solution will be able to process HDTV frames in real time.