Iterative Soft Decision Feedback Zig-Zag Equalizer for 2D Intersymbol Interference Channels

We present a novel iterative soft decision feedback zig-zag algorithm for detection of binary images corrupted by two dimensional intersymbol interference and additive white Gaussian noise. The algorithm exchanges soft information between maximum-a-posteriori detectors employing different zigzag scan directions. Each detector exploits soft-decision feedback from the other zig-zag detectors. Simulation results for the 2 × 2 averaging mask channel show that, at low signal-to-noise ratios, the new algorithm gains about 1 dB over an iterative row column soft decision feedback algorithm and over a separable mask algorithm, two of the best previously published schemes. When the zig-zag algorithm is concatenated with the row-column algorithm, the concatenated system performs as well as or better than four of the best previously published algorithms, at both low and high signal-to-noise ratios, for a variety of 2 × 2 and 3 × 3 convolution masks; in several cases, the system performs within less than 0.1 dB of the maximum-likelihood performance bound.