Arithmetic Coding with Adaptive Context-Tree Weighting for the H.264 Video Coders

We propose applying an adaptive context-tree weighting (CTW) method in the H.264 video coders. We first investigate two different ways to incorporating the CTW method into an H.264 coder and compare the coding effectiveness of using the method with that of using the context models specified in the H.264 standard. We then describe a novel approach for automatically adapting the CTW method based on the syntactic element to be coded and the encoding parameters. We show that our CTW-based arithmetic coding method yields similar or better compression results compared with the context-based adaptive arithmetic coding method used in H.264, without having to specify so many context models.