Hybrid Minimum Pearson and Euclidean Distance Detection

The reliability of mass storage systems, such as optical data recording and non-volatile memory (Flash), is seriously hampered by uncertainty of the actual value of the offset (drift) or gain (amplitude) of the retrieved signal. The recently introduced minimum Pearson distance detection is immune to unknown offset or gain, but this virtue comes at the cost of a lessened noise margin at nominal channel conditions. We will present a novel hybrid detection method, where we combine the outputs of the minimum Euclidean distance and Pearson distance detectors so that we may trade detection robustness versus noise margin. We will compute the error performance of hybrid detection in the presence of unknown channel mismatch and additive noise.