One of the subjects which I recently blogged about, is that when encoding video-streams, some Codecs use 8×8 sample Discrete Cosine Transforms, but as with many DCTs, the coefficients produced tend to be values, which would take up too much space to store, in a fixed-length format. And so a family of techniques which gets applied, is loosely referred to as ‘Entropy Encoding’, with the key idea being, that the Entropy Encoding used for compressed video, is different again, from the Entropy Encoding used for compressed audio. And the scheme used for video has as advantage, that the encoding itself is lossless. Apparently, there are two variants actually used with H.264-encoded videos, which some people group together as MPEG-4:
- An unspecified form of variable-length encoding,
The latter of which promises better compression, at the cost of greater CPU-power required, both to encode and to decode. I’m going to focus on ‘CABAC’ in this posting. There is an official explanation for how CABAC works, which I will refer to. In order to understand my posting here, the reader will need to have read the documentation I just linked to.
From first impressions – yesterday evening was the first day on which I examined CABAC – I’d say that the official explanation contains an error. And I’ll explain why, by offering a version of Entropy-Encoding, which I know can work, based on the link above, but different from it:
- Integers are meant to be encoded, that are “Binarized”.
- The probability with which the first “Bin” has become (1) instead of (0) can be analyzed as described, resulting in a Context Model of one out of (0, 1, 2), as described.
- The next four Bins may not have individual probabilities computed, only resulting in Context Models (3, 4, 5, 6) when they are (1) instead of (0), which override the Context Model that the first Bin would generate.
- The resulting, one Context Model could be averaged over the previous Values.
- Using As a Pair of values, the Context Model (from the previous values) which was just computed, And the (present) Integer Value, a look-up can take place in a 2-dimensional table, of which sequence of bits to use, to encode (both).
- Because the decoder has chosen the integer value out of a known row in the same look-up table, it can also update the Context Model being used, so that future look-ups when decoding remain unambiguous.
The main problem I see with the official explanation is, that because up to 6 Context Models can be computed, each of which supposedly has its own probability, based on that, the lookup-table in which binary values (entropy encodings) are to be found, would effectively need to be a 6-dimensional table ! Officially, all the Context-Models found, have equal meaning. Software is much-more probable, which uses a 2D table, than software which uses a 6-dimensional table, although according to Theoretical Math, 6-dimensional tables are also possible.
But then, a property of Variable Length Coding which has been observed for some time, was that small integers, such as (0), (1) and (2), were assigned very short bit-sequences to be recognized, while larger integers, such as (16) or (17), were assigned recognizable bit-sequences, which would sometimes have been impractically long, and which resulted in poor compression, when the probability of the integer actually being (0), (1) or (2) decreased.
So, because we know that we can have at least one Context-Model, based on the actual, local probabilities, when the probabilities of very small integers become smaller, a series of entropy-encodings can be selected in the table, the bit-length of which can be made more-uniform, resulting in smaller encodings overall, than what straight Variable-Length Encoding would have generated, CABAC instead being adapted to probable, larger integers.
The fact will remain, that the smaller integers will require fewer bits to encode, in general, than the larger integers. But when the smallest integers become very improbable, the bit-lengths for all the integers can be evened out. This will still result in longer streams overall, as larger integers become more-probable, but in shorter streams than the streams that would result, if the encodings for the smallest integers remained the shortest they could be.