Radio Astronomical Image Formation using Constrained Least Squares and Krylov Subspaces

Image formation for radio astronomy can be defined as estimating the spatial power distribution of celestial sources over the sky, given an array of antennas. One of the challenges with image formation is that the problem becomes ill-posed as the number of pixels becomes large. The introduction of constraints that incorporate a-priori knowledge is crucial. In this paper we show that in addition to non-negativity, the magnitude of each pixel in an image is also bounded from above. Indeed, the classical "dirty image" is an upper bound, but a much tighter upper bound can be formed from the data using array processing techniques. This formulates image formation as a least squares optimization problem with inequality constraints. We propose to solve this constrained least squares problem using active set techniques, and the steps needed to implement it are described. It is shown that the least squares part of the problem can be efficiently implemented with Krylov subspace based techniques, where the structure of the problem allows massive parallelism and reduced storage needs. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated using simulations

Projected gradient descent for non-convex sparse spike estimation

We propose a new algorithm for sparse spike estimation from Fourier measurements. Based on theoretical results on non-convex optimization techniques for off-the-grid sparse spike estimation, we present a projected gradient descent algorithm coupled with a spectral initialization procedure. Our algorithm permits to estimate the positions of large numbers of Diracs in 2d from random Fourier measurements. We present, along with the algorithm, theoretical qualitative insights explaining the success of our algorithm. This opens a new direction for practical off-the-grid spike estimation with theoretical guarantees in imaging applications

Proceedings of the second "international Traveling Workshop on Interactions between Sparse models and Technology" (iTWIST'14)

The implicit objective of the biennial "international - Traveling Workshop on Interactions between Sparse models and Technology" (iTWIST) is to foster collaboration between international scientific teams by disseminating ideas through both specific oral/poster presentations and free discussions. For its second edition, the iTWIST workshop took place in the medieval and picturesque town of Namur in Belgium, from Wednesday August 27th till Friday August 29th, 2014. The workshop was conveniently located in "The Arsenal" building within walking distance of both hotels and town center. iTWIST'14 has gathered about 70 international participants and has featured 9 invited talks, 10 oral presentations, and 14 posters on the following themes, all related to the theory, application and generalization of the "sparsity paradigm": Sparsity-driven data sensing and processing; Union of low dimensional subspaces; Beyond linear and convex inverse problem; Matrix/manifold/graph sensing/processing; Blind inverse problems and dictionary learning; Sparsity and computational neuroscience; Information theory, geometry and randomness; Complexity/accuracy tradeoffs in numerical methods; Sparsity? What's next?; Sparse machine learning and inference.Comment: 69 pages, 24 extended abstracts, iTWIST'14 website: http://sites.google.com/site/itwist1

Super-Resolution in Phase Space

This work considers the problem of super-resolution. The goal is to resolve a Dirac distribution from knowledge of its discrete, low-pass, Fourier measurements. Classically, such problems have been dealt with parameter estimation methods. Recently, it has been shown that convex-optimization based formulations facilitate a continuous time solution to the super-resolution problem. Here we treat super-resolution from low-pass measurements in Phase Space. The Phase Space transformation parametrically generalizes a number of well known unitary mappings such as the Fractional Fourier, Fresnel, Laplace and Fourier transforms. Consequently, our work provides a general super- resolution strategy which is backward compatible with the usual Fourier domain result. We consider low-pass measurements of Dirac distributions in Phase Space and show that the super-resolution problem can be cast as Total Variation minimization. Remarkably, even though are setting is quite general, the bounds on the minimum separation distance of Dirac distributions is comparable to existing methods.Comment: 10 Pages, short paper in part accepted to ICASSP 201