A METHOD OF COMMUNICATING DATA WITHIN A CODER

摘要

Transform based coders are frequently used in digital signal processing. The present invention relates to a method of communicating at least one block of data from a first functional element ( 3; 4; 7; 12; 14 ) within a transform based coder ( 1 ) or decoder ( 10 ) to a second functional element ( 4; 5; 7; 8; 14; 15 ) within the coder or decoder, where the block of data comprises a row-column structure of data coefficients. A significant communication workload occurs between individual elements of the coders and decoders. The present invention seeks to reduce this work-load by making an effort to communicate only non-zero coefficients within a cartesian bounding box of a block between various functional units in a decoding or encoding scheme by reducing the size of the at least one block of data to produce a reduced size data block by elimination ( 31 ) of one or more rows and/or columns of substantially zero valued coefficients, and communicating ( 32 ) the reduced size data block from the first functional element to the second functional element.