Decoding Reed-Muller codes over product sets

We give a polynomial time algorithm to decode multivariate polynomial codes of degree $d$ up to half their minimum distance, when the evaluation points are an arbitrary product set $S^m$, for every $d < |S|$. Previously known algorithms can achieve this only if the set $S$ has some very special algebraic structure, or if the degree $d$ is significantly smaller than $|S|$. We also give a near-linear time randomized algorithm, which is based on tools from list-decoding, to decode these codes from nearly half their minimum distance, provided $d 0$. Our result gives an $m$-dimensional generalization of the well known decoding algorithms for Reed-Solomon codes, and can be viewed as giving an algorithmic version of the Schwartz-Zippel lemma.Comment: 25 pages, 0 figure

On Algebraic Decoding of qq-ary Reed-Muller and Product-Reed-Solomon Codes

We consider a list decoding algorithm recently proposed by Pellikaan-Wu \cite{PW2005} for $q$-ary Reed-Muller codes $\mathcal{RM}_q(\ell, m, n)$ of length $n \leq q^m$ when $\ell \leq q$. A simple and easily accessible correctness proof is given which shows that this algorithm achieves a relative error-correction radius of $\tau \leq (1 - \sqrt{{\ell q^{m-1}}/{n}})$. This is an improvement over the proof using one-point Algebraic-Geometric codes given in \cite{PW2005}. The described algorithm can be adapted to decode Product-Reed-Solomon codes. We then propose a new low complexity recursive algebraic decoding algorithm for Reed-Muller and Product-Reed-Solomon codes. Our algorithm achieves a relative error correction radius of $\tau \leq \prod_{i=1}^m (1 - \sqrt{k_i/q})$. This technique is then proved to outperform the Pellikaan-Wu method in both complexity and error correction radius over a wide range of code rates.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, to be presented at 2007 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, Nice, France (ISIT 2007