Acceleration of context adaptive binary arithmetic coding (cabac) in video codecs

A method of debinarizing Context-based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC) data during video decompression, the method comprising:

• identifying all syntax elements which are coded with a specific bit pattern and bit length that is pre-defined by a protocol;
• arranging the codes of the syntax elements that are identified such that the codes with an equal number of bits are arranged sequentially without any intervening codes having a different number of bits;
• and
• performing de-binarization using the arranged codes of the syntax elements.

A CABAC encoder, comprising:

• a binarization module for converting a syntax element into a sequence of bins;
• a context-index module for obtaining one or more context models for the syntax element based on the sequence of bins, each of the context models being associated with a context model, wherein the context-index module obtains the one or more context models by initializing a context-index of the syntax element associated with a given block and evaluates the context-index of dependent neighboring blocks of the given block, the dependent neighboring blocks being blocks that have a context-index that depends on coding of a current bin position;
• and
• an arithmetic encoder for updating the one or more context models based on the sequence of bins and using the one or more context models to encode each of the bins in the sequence, wherein the arithmetic encoder updates the one or more context models by updating the associated context-indices of the dependent neighboring blocks if and only if their context-indices changes from the initialized values.