US Patent 7480224 Decoding apparatus and method of optical information reproducing system

The invention discloses a decoding apparatus and the method thereof for decoding a signal retrieved by an optical information reproducing system from an optical information recording medium. N legal codes are predetermined. According to the invention, first, the retrieved signal is converted into a data stream. Then, in a Viterbi decoding manner, the data stream is decoded into a digital code in accordance with a level of the data stream and N reference levels. Then, the binary code is decoded by a binary array into one of the N legal codes, and each of the N legal codes corresponds to one of N reference levels. In particular, the N reference levels are corrected by various detected conditions to enhance the correctness of decoded data.