Geometry of the Welch Bounds

A geometric perspective involving Grammian and frame operators is used to derive the entire family of Welch bounds. This perspective unifies a number of observations that have been made regarding tightness of the bounds and their connections to symmetric k-tensors, tight frames, homogeneous polynomials, and t-designs. In particular. a connection has been drawn between sampling of homogeneous polynomials and frames of symmetric k-tensors. It is also shown that tightness of the bounds requires tight frames. The lack of tight frames in symmetric k-tensors in many cases, however, leads to consideration of sets that come as close as possible to attaining the bounds. The geometric derivation is then extended in the setting of generalized or continuous frames. The Welch bounds for finite sets and countably infinite sets become special cases of this general setting.Comment: changes from previous version include: correction of typos, additional references added, new Example 3.

Two are better than one: Fundamental parameters of frame coherence

This paper investigates two parameters that measure the coherence of a frame: worst-case and average coherence. We first use worst-case and average coherence to derive near-optimal probabilistic guarantees on both sparse signal detection and reconstruction in the presence of noise. Next, we provide a catalog of nearly tight frames with small worst-case and average coherence. Later, we find a new lower bound on worst-case coherence; we compare it to the Welch bound and use it to interpret recently reported signal reconstruction results. Finally, we give an algorithm that transforms frames in a way that decreases average coherence without changing the spectral norm or worst-case coherence

Frame Coherence and Sparse Signal Processing

The sparse signal processing literature often uses random sensing matrices to obtain performance guarantees. Unfortunately, in the real world, sensing matrices do not always come from random processes. It is therefore desirable to evaluate whether an arbitrary matrix, or frame, is suitable for sensing sparse signals. To this end, the present paper investigates two parameters that measure the coherence of a frame: worst-case and average coherence. We first provide several examples of frames that have small spectral norm, worst-case coherence, and average coherence. Next, we present a new lower bound on worst-case coherence and compare it to the Welch bound. Later, we propose an algorithm that decreases the average coherence of a frame without changing its spectral norm or worst-case coherence. Finally, we use worst-case and average coherence, as opposed to the Restricted Isometry Property, to garner near-optimal probabilistic guarantees on both sparse signal detection and reconstruction in the presence of noise. This contrasts with recent results that only guarantee noiseless signal recovery from arbitrary frames, and which further assume independence across the nonzero entries of the signal---in a sense, requiring small average coherence replaces the need for such an assumption

Grassmannian Frames with Applications to Coding and Communication

For a given class ${\cal F}$ of uniform frames of fixed redundancy we define a Grassmannian frame as one that minimizes the maximal correlation $|< f_k,f_l >|$ among all frames $\{f_k\}_{k \in {\cal I}} \in {\cal F}$. We first analyze finite-dimensional Grassmannian frames. Using links to packings in Grassmannian spaces and antipodal spherical codes we derive bounds on the minimal achievable correlation for Grassmannian frames. These bounds yield a simple condition under which Grassmannian frames coincide with uniform tight frames. We exploit connections to graph theory, equiangular line sets, and coding theory in order to derive explicit constructions of Grassmannian frames. Our findings extend recent results on uniform tight frames. We then introduce infinite-dimensional Grassmannian frames and analyze their connection to uniform tight frames for frames which are generated by group-like unitary systems. We derive an example of a Grassmannian Gabor frame by using connections to sphere packing theory. Finally we discuss the application of Grassmannian frames to wireless communication and to multiple description coding.Comment: Submitted in June 2002 to Appl. Comp. Harm. Ana

Deterministic Constructions of Binary Measurement Matrices from Finite Geometry

Deterministic constructions of measurement matrices in compressed sensing (CS) are considered in this paper. The constructions are inspired by the recent discovery of Dimakis, Smarandache and Vontobel which says that parity-check matrices of good low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes can be used as {provably} good measurement matrices for compressed sensing under $\ell_1$-minimization. The performance of the proposed binary measurement matrices is mainly theoretically analyzed with the help of the analyzing methods and results from (finite geometry) LDPC codes. Particularly, several lower bounds of the spark (i.e., the smallest number of columns that are linearly dependent, which totally characterizes the recovery performance of $\ell_0$-minimization) of general binary matrices and finite geometry matrices are obtained and they improve the previously known results in most cases. Simulation results show that the proposed matrices perform comparably to, sometimes even better than, the corresponding Gaussian random matrices. Moreover, the proposed matrices are sparse, binary, and most of them have cyclic or quasi-cyclic structure, which will make the hardware realization convenient and easy.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figure