  The soft-aided bit-marking (SABM) algorithm is based on the idea of marking
bits as highly reliable bits (HRBs), highly unreliable bits (HUBs), and
uncertain bits to improve the performance of hard-decision (HD) decoders. The
HRBs and HUBs are used to assist the HD decoders to prevent miscorrections and
to decode those originally uncorrectable cases via bit flipping (BF),
respectively. In this paper, an improved SABM algorithm (called iSABM) is
proposed for staircase codes (SCCs). Similar to the SABM, iSABM marks bits with
the help of channel reliabilities, i.e., using the absolute values of the
log-likelihood ratios. The improvements offered by iSABM include: (i) HUBs
being classified using a reliability threshold, (ii) BF randomly selecting
HUBs, and (iii) soft-aided decoding over multiple SCC blocks. The decoding
complexity of iSABM is comparable of that of SABM. This is due to the fact that
on the one hand no sorting is required (lower complexity) because of the use of
a threshold for HUBs, while on the other hand multiple SCC blocks use soft
information (higher complexity). Additional gains of up to 0.53 dB with respect
to SABM and 0.91 dB with respect to standard SCC decoding at a bit error rate
of $10^{-6}$ are reported. Furthermore, it is shown that using 1-bit
reliability marking, i.e., only having HRBs and HUBs, only causes a gain
penalty of up to 0.25 dB with a significantly reduced memory requirement.
