Fast H.264 video decoding by bit order reversing and its application to real-time H.264 video encryption

The demand on fast H.264 video processing technology is highly increasing since the electronics devices with encoding, transmission, and decoding high-resolution video are becoming popular in the consumer market. In this paper, we present a fast H.264 video decoding method by modifying the algorithm dealing with parsing bit-stream of variable-length code (VLC). The key idea of our approach is to reverse the bit order in a fast way through LUT (Look-Up-Table) in order to reduce the bit pattern extraction time for VLC stream. We demonstrated the speedup by employing the proposed idea for H.264 real-time video encryption application. The experimental results show about 11% execution time reduction in the part of video stream parsing function and 3.1% time reduction in the whole video encryption system. © 2016 SERSC.