Readable erasures improve the performance of Reed-Solomon codes (Corresp.)
Elwyn R. Berlekamp, J. Ramsey · IEEE Transactions on Information Theory · 1978
Since well-known decoding algorithms [1],[2] are able to correct both character errors and character erasures withq-ary Reed-Solomon codes, some modulation and demodulation schemes designed to be used with such codes provide a channel that hasqinputs andq + 1outputs,qof which correspond to theqinputs and one of which corresponds to the "erasure" symbol. This correspondence points om the relative advantages offered by a slightly more refined demodulation scheme, which creates a digital channel that hasqinputs and2_{q}outputs,qof which correspond to "strong" receptions of the inputs andqof which correspond to "weak" receptions of the inputs. For decoding purposes, allqweak outputs may be treated as erasures, but the fact that the channel now provides additional information facilitates improved decoding performance by reading the weak characters under the erasures.