Series concatenation of 2D convolutional codes

In this paper we study two-dimensional (2D) con-volutional codes which are obtained from series concatenation of two 2D convolutional codes. In this preliminary work we confine ourselves to dealing with finite-support 2D convolutional codes and make use of the so-called Fornasini-Marchesini input-state-output (ISO) model representations. In particular, we show that the series concatenation of two 2D convolutional codes is again a 2D convolutional code and we explicitly compute an ISO representation of the code. Within these ISO representations we study when the structural properties of reachability and observability of the two given ISO representations carry over to the resulting 2D convolutional code.