Performance of optimal digital page detection in a two-dimensional ISI/AWGN channel

The performance of maximum likelihood page detection (MLPD) of digital pages of data corrupted by intersymbol interference (ISI) and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is derived. While the development concentrates on the linear ISI channel with AWGN, the results characterize the performance of the ML state estimator for a more general class of Markov random fields. Hence, while page detection in optical memory systems provides the motivation, the results are applicable to a broader class of problems including image de-blurring. While MLPD is infeasible, its performance provides a lower bound for the performance of practical data detection techniques. This utility is demonstrated through numerical examples.