Patent ID: 6961475

Claim:
A method comprising: performing a significance propagation pass on a group of coefficients; creating a data structure, while performing the significance propagation pass, that indicates locations of coefficients in the group of coefficients that are to be processed in subsequent passes; and performing a refinement sub-bitplane pass by accessing the data structure to obtain information to identify coefficients to be skipped for refinement sub-bitplane pass processing, accessing a memory storing the group of coefficient using the information to only access coefficients identified as being in the refinement pass, and coding refinement bits accessed from the memory, wherein the data structure comprises describes locations of coefficients in a refinement sub-bitplane pass for the group of coefficients, wherein the data structure includes an indication of each run of refinement bits and the number of coefficients to skip in the group of coefficients before the next run of refinement bits, and wherein at least one of the indication of each run of refinement bits and the number of coefficients to skip is represented with a variable length code as follows: count codeword 1 000 2 001 3 010 4 011 5 1000000000000 6 1000000000001 . . . . . . 4096 1111111111011.