Fast entropy decoding method for high resolution personal video recorder

In this paper, we propose a fast entropy decoding method that is well suited for personal video recorder (PVR) applications for high resolution video (HRV). In PVR applications supporting HRV, it is essential to implement a fast encoder and decoder due to the large amount of video data. The proposed bit-precision based entropy method (BPEM) provides a way to design a very simple entropy decoding process, which can substantially reduce the overall computational complexity of the decoder. For the purpose of contents protection, it is common to have a proprietary codec in PVR. In such a case, additional transcoding for storing transmitted data is required. However, this may involve a complex process that requires encoding and decoding. The proposed method is only applied to the entropy coding method of the existing standard codecs for transcoding thereby reducing the transcoding complexity down to bitstream-level symbol mapping. We implemented BPEM on an MPEG-4 simple profile (SP) codec. The experimental results showed that BPEM produced about 30 percent lower decoder complexity and 50 to 80 percent lower syntax parsing time while maintaining similar coding efficiency compared to the conventional MPEG-4 SP codec.