Techniques for increasing throughput in HEVC transform coefficient coding

Transform coefficient coding in HEVC encompasses the scanning patterns and the coding methods for the last significant coefficient, significance map, coefficient levels and sign data. Unlike H.264/AVC, HEVC has a single entropy coding mode based on the context adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) engine. Due to this, achieving high throughput for transform coefficient coding was an important design consideration. This paper analyzes the throughput of different components of transform coefficient coding with special emphasis on the explicit coding of the last significant coefficient position and high throughput binarization. A comparison with H.264/AVC transform coefficient coding is also presented, demonstrating that HEVC transform coefficient coding achieves higher average and worst case throughput.