An Improved Method to CABAC in the H.264/AVC Video Compression Standard

Abstract

Context-based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC) is adopted as an entropy coding tool for main profile of the video coding standard H.264/AVC, CABAC achieves higher degree of redundancy reduction by estimating the conditional probability of each binary symbol which is the input to the arithmetic coder. This paper presents an entropy coding method based on CABAC. In the proposed method, the binary symbol is coded using more precisely estimated conditional probability, thereby leading to performance improvement. We apply our method to the standard and evaluate its performance for different video sources and various quantization parameters (QP). Experiment results show that our method outperforms the original CABAC in term of coding efficiency, and the average bit-rate savings are up to 1.2%.