A hardware implementation of a run length encoding compression algorithm with parallel inputs

Abstract

Run length encoding can be found in numerous applications such as data transfer or image storing (Sayood, 2002). It is a well known, easy and efficient compression method based on the assumption of long data sequences without the change of content. These sequences can be described by their position and length of appearance. Implementations using dedicated logic are optimised for parallel data processing. Here, images are transferred in blocks of multiple pixels in parallel. A compression of these streams into a run length code requires an encoder with a parallel input. This run length encoder has to compress the sequence at a minimum of clock cycles to avoid long inhibit intervals at the input. This paper describes a hardware algorithm performing a high performance run length encoding for binary images using a parallel input.