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M. Shafique, S. Rehman, F. Kriebel, M. Khan, B. Zatt, A. Subramaniyan, B. Vizzotto, J. Henkel:
"Application-Guided Power-Efficient Fault Tolerance for H.264 Context Adaptive Variable Length Coding";
IEEE Transactions on Computers, 66 (2017), 4; S. 560 - 574.

This paper presents a fault-tolerance technique for H.264´s Context-Adaptive Variable Length Coding (CAVLC) on unreliable computing hardware. The application-specific knowledge is leveraged at both algorithm and architecture levels to protect the CAVLC process (especially context adaptation and coding tables) in a reliable yet power-efficient manner. Specifically, the statistical analysis of coding syntax and video content properties are exploited for: (1) selective redundancy of coefficient/header data of video bitstreams; (2) partitioning the coding tables into various sub-tables to reduce the power overhead of fault tolerance; and (3) run-time power management of memory parts storing the sub-tables and their parity computations. Experimental results demonstrate that leveraging application-specific knowledge reduces area and performance overhead by 2x compared to a double-parity table protection technique. For functional verification and area comparison, the complete H.264 CAVLC architecture is prototyped on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA (though not limited to it).

Application-specific optimization, h.264, entropy coding, video coding, reliability, fault tolerance

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TC.2016.2616313