Abstract
A novel priority-based heading one detector for Exp-Golomb/CAVLC decoding of H.264/AVC is presented. It exploits the statistical distribution of input encoded codewords and adopts a nonuniform partition decoding scheme for the detector. Compared with a conventional design without power optimization, the power consumption can be reduced by more than 3 times while the performance is maintained and the design hardware cost does not increase. The proposed detector has successfully been verified and implemented in a complete H.264/AVC decoding system.