Decoding on adaptively pruned trellis for correcting synchronization errors

Forward-backward algorithm, used by watermark decoder for correcting non-binary synchronization errors, requires to traverse a very large scale trellis in order to achieve the proper posterior probability, leading to high computational complexity. In order to reduce the number of the states involved in the computation, an adaptive pruning method for the trellis is proposed. In this scheme, we prune the states which have the low forward-backward quantities below a carefully-chosen threshold. Thus, a wandering trellis with much less states is achieved, which contains most of the states with quite high probability. Simulation results reveal that, with the proper scaling factor, significant complexity reduction in the forward-backward algorithm is achieved at the expense of slight performance degradation.