Abstract
This letter tackles the problem of reducing the complexity of H.264 decoding. Since deblocking accounts for a significant percentage of H.264 decoding time, our focus is on the H.264 in-loop deblocking filter. Observing that branch operations are costly and that in the deblocking process there are events with significantly high probability of occurrence, we regroup and simplify the branch operations. We apply the idea of Huffman tree optimization to speed up the boundary strength derivation and the true-edge detection by taking advantage of the biased statistical distribution. Our analyses and experiments show that the proposed techniques can reduce the deblocking computation time typically by a factor of more than seven times, while maintaining the bit-exact output. © 2009 IEEE.