Abstract:The efficiency of traditional binary Huffman decoding method is very low. A new decoding method based on octonary Huffman trees is presented in this paper to improve the decoding speed. Huffman codes are represented as an octonary tree and reconstructed as a single dimensional array according to the position of each node in the tree. When decoding, three bit code elements are read from the bitstream each time, and direct numerical computation may be used to replace “judge and jump” operations, which improve decoding efficiency. The proposed method is also applied to VLC and RVLC decoding algorithms of MPEG-4. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method can greatly improve decoding efficiency without increasing memory consumption much, and it exhibits better performance than other decoding methods.