Device and method for masking a fault

摘要

A device for masking a fault in a faulty or potentially faulty information unit generates output values of a forward decoder (14) and of a backward decoder (16), which differ from one another thereby indicating (18) a fault masking area. The different values for one and the same information unit are checked with regard to a predetermined criterion in order to select (22) the value that fulfills, i.e. is plausible for, the predetermined criterion. This enables, without impairing a compression rate, an elimination or reduction of the continuation faults introduced during a decoding of blocks comprised of reversible code words of a variable length.