In this paper, we propose an adaptive and scalable soft variable length code (VLC) decoder to greatly reduce overall design complexity. Generally, a soft VLC decoder needs to maintain many states for the correct decoding when the sequence length or table size grows. We propose an adaptive sorting scheme to reduce the memory accesses and design complexity. We reduce the table size by using symbol-merging and table-merging schemes. In addition, the proposed Black-Box model improves the accuracy of performance estimation by a novel measurement of "symbolalias" and also achieves a better tradeoff between performance and complexity. Further, no side information is transmitted and the proposed soft VLC decoder is bandwidth-efficient. The proposed design is evaluated using the model of MPEG-4/UDP-Lite/UEP/ AWGN, and hence it is standard-compliant. We averagely improve the peak signal-to-noise ratio by 0.4 2.9 dB as compared with traditional VLC decoding and standard-support reversible VLC decoding schemes.

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