Improved Compressive Sensing Of Natural Scenes Using Localized Random Sampling

Compressive sensing (CS) theory demonstrates that by using uniformly-random sampling, rather than uniformly-spaced sampling, higher quality image reconstructions are often achievable. Considering that the structure of sampling protocols has such a profound impact on the quality of image reconstructions, we formulate a new sampling scheme motivated by physiological receptive field structure, localized random sampling, which yields significantly improved CS image reconstructions. For each set of localized image measurements, our sampling method first randomly selects an image pixel and then measures its nearby pixels with probability depending on their distance from the initially selected pixel. We compare the uniformly-random and localized random sampling methods over a large space of sampling parameters, and show that, for the optimal parameter choices, higher quality image reconstructions can be consistently obtained by using localized random sampling. In addition, we argue that the localized random CS optimal parameter choice is stable with respect to diverse natural images, and scales with the number of samples used for reconstruction. We expect that the localized random sampling protocol helps to explain the evolutionarily advantageous nature of receptive field structure in visual systems and suggests several future research areas in CS theory and its application to brain imaging

Random periodic sampling patterns for shift-invariant spaces

We consider multi-variate signals spanned by the integer shifts of a set of generating functions with distinct frequency profiles and the problem of reconstructing them from samples taken on a random periodic set. We show that such a sampling strategy succeeds with high probability provided that the density of the sampling pattern exceeds the number of frequency profiles by a logarithmic factor. The signal model includes bandlimited functions with multi-band spectra. While in this well-studied setting delicate constructions provide sampling strategies that meet the information theoretic benchmark of Shannon and Landau, the sampling pattern that we consider provides, at the price of a logarithmic oversampling factor, a simple alternative that is accompanied by favorable a priori stability margins (snug frames). More generally, we also treat bandlimited functions with arbitrary compact spectra, and different measures of its complexity and approximation rates by integer tiles. At the technical level, we elaborate on recent work on relevant sampling, with the key difference that the reconstruction guarantees that we provide hold uniformly for all signals, rather than for a subset of well-concentrated ones. This is achieved by methods of concentration of measure formulated on the Zak domain

Fourier Analysis of Stochastic Sampling Strategies for Assessing Bias and Variance in Integration

Each pixel in a photorealistic, computer generated picture is calculated by approximately integrating all the light arriving at the pixel, from the virtual scene. A common strategy to calculate these high-dimensional integrals is to average the estimates at stochastically sampled locations. The strategy with which the sampled locations are chosen is of utmost importance in deciding the quality of the approximation, and hence rendered image. We derive connections between the spectral properties of stochastic sampling patterns and the first and second order statistics of estimates of integration using the samples. Our equations provide insight into the assessment of stochastic sampling strategies for integration. We show that the amplitude of the expected Fourier spectrum of sampling patterns is a useful indicator of the bias when used in numerical integration. We deduce that estimator variance is directly dependent on the variance of the sampling spectrum over multiple realizations of the sampling pattern. We then analyse Gaussian jittered sampling, a simple variant of jittered sampling, that allows a smooth trade-off of bias for variance in uniform (regular grid) sampling. We verify our predictions using spectral measurement, quantitative integration experiments and qualitative comparisons of rendered images.</jats:p