Correcting two-dimensional clusters by interleaving of symbols

The purpose of this paper is to present techniques for two dimensional interleaving of error-correcting codes in order to correct two dimensional bursts (or clusters) of errors. We present a novel method for correcting two dimensional bursts by interleaving symbols (of say, a Reed-Solomon code) in such a way that the amount of redundancy is minimized. The basic idea is to tile the two dimensional array of bits with symbols of a given area such that the number of different codes required to correct bursts of a given size is minimized. Our constructions, in many cases achieve or get very close to the lower bound on the amount of redundancy bits