Multi-symbol Accessing Huffman Decoding Method for MPEG-2 AAC

Abstract

An MPEG-2 AAC Huffman decoding method based on the fixed length compacted codeword tables, where each codeword can contain multiple number of Huffman codes, was proposed. The proposed method enhances the searching efficiency by finding multiple symbols in a single search, i.e., a direct memory reading of the compacted codeword table. The memory usage is significantly saved by separately handling the Huffman codes that exceed the length of the compacted codewords. The trade-off relation between the computational complexity and the amount of memory usage was analytically derived to find the proper codeword length of the compacted codewords for the design of MPEG-2 AAC decoder. To validate the proposed algorithm, its performance was experimentally evaluated with an implemented MPEG-2 AAC decoder. The results showed that the computational complexity of the proposed method is reduced to 54% of that of the most up-to-date method.