This paper proposes an adaptive marker coding (AMC) for correction of insertion/deletion/substitution errors. Unlike the conventional marker codings which select marker-bit values deterministically, the AMC adaptively reverses the first and last bits of each marker as well as bits surrounding the marker. Decoding is based on a forward-backward algorithm which takes into account the dependency of bit-values around the marker. Evaluation shows that, for a channel with insertion/deletion error probability 1.8×10-2, the decoded BER of existing marker coding of rate 9/16 is 4.25×10-3, while that of the proposed coding with the same code rate is 1.73×10-3.

In this paper a new class of single error-correcting fixed block-length (d, k) codes has been proposed. The correctable error types are peak-shift error, insertion or deletion error, symmetric error, etc. The basic technique to construct codes is a systematic construction algorithm of multilevel sequences with a constant Lee weight (TALG algorithm). The coding rate and efficiency are considerably good, and hence the proposed new codes will be very useful for improving the reliability of high density magnetic recording.

Viterbi decoding is known as a decoding scheme that can realize maximum likelihood decoding. However, it is impossible to continue it without re-synchronization even if only an insertion/deletion error occurs in a channel. In this paper, we show that Levenshtein distance is suitable for the metric of Viterbi decoding in a channel where not only symbol errors but also insertion/deletion errors occur under some conditions and we propose a kind of Viterbi decoding considering insertion/deletion errors.