The "International Symposium on Topics in Coding" (ISTC) is a biennial conference supported by the IEEE Information Theory Society. First held in 1997 in Brest, France, as a conference on turbo coding only, it now covers topics from many fields concerning coding, such as coding for wireless channels, quantum computation, and storage. For the first time, this year's ISTC was held in the USA. It took place at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), from August 18-22, 2025.
Soft-Output from Covered Space Decoding of Product Codes
The INUE presented the paper "Soft-Output from Covered Space Decoding of Product Codes", authored by Tim Janz, Simon Obermüller, Andreas Zunker, and Stephan ten Brink, that introduces the "covered space" of a list decoder to estimate the reliability of all positions accurately.
Typically, in Turbo Product decoding, for each component code a list of codewords is found. Based on the individual probabilities of these codewords, an estimate of the reliability of all positions can be found. To increase the accuracy of this estimate, the INUE researchers used properties of the list decoder and the component code, called the covered space. This significantly decreases the bit error rate, gaining more than 0.2 dB over the state-of-the-art Chase-Pyndiah decoder.
For their work and presentation, the INUE researchers received the ISTC 2025 Best Paper Award.
