Patent ID: 7652599

Claim:
A method for performing renormalization in a data entropy reduction process of an image in a compression path, the method comprising: maintaining an accumulator used for one of encoding and decoding according to an arithmetic coding process, an output segment size number of most significant bits of the accumulator representing an output segment, wherein a value stored in the accumulator is altered, in accordance with the arithmetic coding process, to reflect an input data symbol; determining, based on an encoding range value for an input data symbol, that processing the input data symbol is able to cause a change in a value of the output segment; determining, in response to determining that processing the new input data symbol is able to cause a change in a value of the output segment, that a first size is less than a second size, wherein the first size is a size of a portion of the encoding range that is able to cause the change in a value of the output segment when added to the accumulator, and the second size is a size of a portion of the encoding range that fails to cause the change in the value of the output segment when added to the accumulator; limiting, in response to determining that the first size is less than the second size, the encoding range value to the second size; setting, in response to determining the first size is not less than the second size, the encoding range value to the first size; and outputting, in response to determining that processing the new input data symbol is able to cause a change in a value of the output segment, the encoding range value.