An optical communication system, a transmitter, a receiver, and methods of operating the same are provided. In particular, a transmitter is disclosed as being configured to encode optical signals in accordance with a multi-level coding scheme. The receiver is configured to provide receive and decode to the optical signals received from the transmitter. One or both of the receiver and transmitter are configured to compensate for non-idealities or non-linearities introduced into the communication system by optical components of the system.