Abstract—Suppose is an unknown vector in (a digital image or signal); we plan to measure general linear functionals of and then reconstruct. If is known to be compressible by transform coding with a known transform, and we reconstruct via the nonlinear procedure defined here, the number of measurements can be dramatically smaller than the size. Thus, certain natural classes of images with pixels need only = ( 1 4 log 5 2 ()) nonadaptive nonpixel samples for faithful recovery, as opposed to the usual pixel samples. More specifically, suppose has a sparse representation in some orthonormal basis (e.g., wavelet, Fourier) or tight frame (e.g., curvelet, Gabor)—so the coefficients belong to an ball for 0 1. The most important coefficients in that expansion allow reconstruction with 2 error ( 1 2 1

Abstract. Subset selection and sparse approximation problems request a good approximation of an input signal using a linear combination of elementary signals, yet they stipulate that the approximation may only involve a few of the elementary signals. This class of problems arises throughout electrical engineering, applied mathematics and statistics, but small theoretical progress has been made over the last fifty years. Subset selection and sparse approximation both admit natural convex relaxations, but the literature contains few results on the behavior of these relaxations for general input signals. This report demonstrates that the solution of the convex program frequently coincides with the solution of the original approximation problem. The proofs depend essentially on geometric properties of the ensemble of elementary signals. The results are powerful because sparse approximation problems are combinatorial, while convex programs can be solved in polynomial time with standard software. Comparable new results for a greedy algorithm, Orthogonal Matching Pursuit, are also stated. This report should have a major practical impact because the theory applies immediately to many real-world signal processing problems. 1.

Abstract—We address the problem of finding sparse solutions to an underdetermined system of equations when there are multiple measurement vectors having the same, but unknown, sparsity structure. The single measurement sparse solution problem has been extensively studied in the past. Although known to be NP-hard, many single–measurement suboptimal algorithms have been formulated that have found utility in many different applications. Here, we consider in depth the extension of two classes of algorithms–Matching Pursuit (MP) and FOCal Underdetermined System Solver (FOCUSS)–to the multiple measurement case so that they may be used in applications such as neuromagnetic imaging, where multiple measurement vectors are available, and solutions with a common sparsity structure must be computed. Cost functions appropriate to the multiple measurement problem are developed, and algorithms are derived based on their minimization. A simulation study is conducted on a test-case dictionary to show how the utilization of more than one measurement vector improves the performance of the MP and FOCUSS classes of algorithm, and their performances are compared. I.

Abstract—We present a source localization method based on a sparse representation of sensor measurements with an overcomplete basis composed of samples from the array manifold. We enforce sparsity by imposing penalties based on the 1-norm. A number of recent theoretical results on sparsifying properties of 1 penalties justify this choice. Explicitly enforcing the sparsity of the representation is motivated by a desire to obtain a sharp estimate of the spatial spectrum that exhibits super-resolution. We propose to use the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the data matrix to summarize multiple time or frequency samples. Our formulation leads to an optimization problem, which we solve efficiently in a second-order cone (SOC) programming framework by an interior point implementation. We propose a grid refinement method to mitigate the effects of limiting estimates to a grid of spatial locations and introduce an automatic selection criterion for the regularization parameter involved in our approach. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method on simulated data by plots of spatial spectra and by comparing the estimator variance to the Cramér–Rao bound (CRB). We observe that our approach has a number of advantages over other source localization techniques, including increased resolution, improved robustness to noise, limitations in data quantity, and correlation of the sources, as well as not requiring an accurate initialization. Index Terms—Direction-of-arrival estimation, overcomplete representation, sensor array processing, source localization, sparse representation, superresolution. I.

We present a condition on the matrix of an underdetermined linear system which guarantees that the solution of the system with minimal ℓq-quasinorm is also the sparsest one. This generalizes, and sightly improves, a similar result for the ℓ1-norm. We then introduce a simple numerical scheme to compute solutions with minimal ℓq-quasinorm, and we study its convergence. Finally, we display the results of some experiments which indicate that the ℓq-method performs better than other available methods. 1

The minimum ℓ1-norm solution to an underdetermined system of linear equations y = Ax, is often, remarkably, also the sparsest solution to that system. This sparsity-seeking property is of interest in signal processing and information transmission. However, general-purpose optimizers are much too slow for ℓ1 minimization in many large-scale applications. The Homotopy method was originally proposed by Osborne et al. for solving noisy overdetermined ℓ1-penalized least squares problems. We here apply it to solve the noiseless underdetermined ℓ1-minimization problem min ‖x‖1 subject to y = Ax. We show that Homotopy runs much more rapidly than general-purpose LP solvers when sufficient sparsity is present. Indeed, the method often has the following k-step solution property: if the underlying solution has only k nonzeros, the Homotopy method reaches that solution in only k iterative steps. When this property holds and k is small compared to the problem size, this means that ℓ1 minimization problems with k-sparse solutions can be solved in a fraction of the cost of solving one full-sized linear system. We demonstrate this k-step solution property for two kinds of problem suites. First,

If a signal x is known to have a sparse representation with respect to a frame, it can be estimated from a noise-corrupted observation y by finding the best sparse approximation to y. Removing noise in this manner depends on the frame efficiently representing the signal while it inefficiently represents the noise. The mean-squared error (MSE) of this denoising scheme and the probability that the estimate has the same sparsity pattern as the original signal are analyzed. First an MSE bound that depends on a new bound on approximating a Gaussian signal as a linear combination of elements of an overcomplete dictionary is given. Further analyses are for dictionaries generated randomly according to a spherically-symmetric distribution and signals expressible with single dictionary elements. Easily-computed approximations for the probability of selecting the correct dictionary element and the MSE are given. Asymptotic expressions reveal a critical input signal-to-noise ratio for signal recovery.

The goal of sparse approximation problems is to represent a target signal approximately as a linear combination of a few elementary signals drawn from a fixed collection. This paper surveys the major practical algorithms for sparse approximation. Specific attention is paid to computational issues, to the circumstances in which individual methods tend to perform well, and to the theoretical guarantees available. Many fundamental questions in electrical engineering, statistics, and applied mathematics can be posed as sparse approximation problems, making these algorithms versatile and relevant to a wealth of applications.

Approximating a signal or an image with a sparse linear expansion from an overcomplete dictionary of atoms is an extremely useful tool to solve many signal processing problems. Finding the sparsest approximation of a signal from an arbitrary dictionary is an NP-hard problem. Despite of this, several algorithms have been proposed that provide sub-optimal solutions. However, it is generally difficult to know how close the computed solution is to being “optimal”, and whether another algorithm could provide a better result. In this paper we provide a simple test to check whether the output of a sparse approximation algorithm is nearly optimal, in the sense that no significantly different linear expansion from the dictionary can provide both a smaller approximation error and a better sparsity. As a byproduct of our theorems, we obtain results on the identifiability of sparse overcomplete models in the presence of noise, for a fairly large class of sparse priors. 1.

Several concepts for the localization of a frame are studied. The intrinsic localization of a frame is defined by the decay properties of its Gramian matrix. Our main result asserts that the canonical dual frame possesses the same intrinsic localization as the original frame. The proof relies heavily on Banach algebra techniques, in particular on recent spectral invariance properties for certain Banach algebras of infinite matrices. Intrinsically localized frames extend in a natural way to Banach frames for a class of associated Banach spaces which are defined by weighted ℓ p-coefficients of their frame expansions. As an example the time-frequency concentration of distributions is characterized by means of localized (non-uniform) Gabor frames.