Robert Kenney
Paul Zeman

Serial EBCOT Encoder

JPEG2000 is an emerging image compression standard which incorporates
EBCOT as the entropy and arithmetic encoding engine.  The EBCOT coder
allows for high compression ratios but operates at the bitplane level,
resulting in slow execution times on general purpose computers.  In our
project, we present a novel tier 1 entropy encoding architecture.  Tier
1 EBCOT consists of three separate coding passes, which in the original
specification are performed serially.  Recent research has demonstrated
the possibility of parallelizing the three passes, however all current
implementations only allow for lock-step execution of the three passes. 
Our architecture allows for greater parallelism by easing the lock-step
restriction, allowing the passes the freedom to move relative to one
another.  Our project will implement a base case serial EBCOT encoder,
and we will compare our parallel architecture against it.