An Empirical Study of Entropy-Conserving Binarization in H.264/AVC CABAC (opens in new tab)

CABAC, the entropy coder of H.264/AVC and the basis for HEVC and VVC, decomposes multi-symbol values into bins via a binarization scheme before a binary arithmetic coder. H.264 uses Truncated Unary plus k-th order Exp-Golomb (UEG); alternatives include canonical Huffman and the entropy-conserving binarization (ECB), which provably preserves entropy mapping m-ary data to m-1 binary strings but has not been evaluated inside a production binary a...