Arithmetic coding with constrained carry operations

Abo Talib Mahfoodh, Amir Said, Sehoon Yea

Abstract: Buffer or counter-based techniques are adequate for dealing with carry propagation in software implementations of arithmetic coding, but create problems in hardware implementations due to the difficulty of handling worst-case scenarios, defined by very long propagations. We propose a new technique for constraining the carry propagation, similar to “bit-stuffing,” but designed for encoders that generate data as bytes instead of individual bits, and is based on the fact that the encoder and decoder can maintain the same state, and both can identify the situations when it desired to limit carry propagation. The new technique adjusts the coding interval in a way that corresponds to coding an unused data symbol, but selected to minimize overhead. Our experimental results demonstrate that the loss in compression can be made very small using regular precision for arithmetic operations.