Super-Resolution of Positive Sources: the Discrete Setup

In single-molecule microscopy it is necessary to locate with high precision point sources from noisy observations of the spectrum of the signal at frequencies capped by $f_c$, which is just about the frequency of natural light. This paper rigorously establishes that this super-resolution problem can be solved via linear programming in a stable manner. We prove that the quality of the reconstruction crucially depends on the Rayleigh regularity of the support of the signal; that is, on the maximum number of sources that can occur within a square of side length about $1/f_c$. The theoretical performance guarantee is complemented with a converse result showing that our simple convex program convex is nearly optimal. Finally, numerical experiments illustrate our methods.Comment: 31 page, 7 figure

Multiple Illumination Phaseless Super-Resolution (MIPS) with Applications To Phaseless DOA Estimation and Diffraction Imaging

Phaseless super-resolution is the problem of recovering an unknown signal from measurements of the magnitudes of the low frequency Fourier transform of the signal. This problem arises in applications where measuring the phase, and making high-frequency measurements, are either too costly or altogether infeasible. The problem is especially challenging because it combines the difficult problems of phase retrieval and classical super-resolutionComment: To appear in ICASSP 201

Super-Resolution of Mutually Interfering Signals

We consider simultaneously identifying the membership and locations of point sources that are convolved with different low-pass point spread functions, from the observation of their superpositions. This problem arises in three-dimensional super-resolution single-molecule imaging, neural spike sorting, multi-user channel identification, among others. We propose a novel algorithm, based on convex programming, and establish its near-optimal performance guarantee for exact recovery by exploiting the sparsity of the point source model as well as incoherence between the point spread functions. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.Comment: ISIT 201

Towards a Mathematical Theory of Super-Resolution

This paper develops a mathematical theory of super-resolution. Broadly speaking, super-resolution is the problem of recovering the fine details of an object---the high end of its spectrum---from coarse scale information only---from samples at the low end of the spectrum. Suppose we have many point sources at unknown locations in $[0,1]$ and with unknown complex-valued amplitudes. We only observe Fourier samples of this object up until a frequency cut-off $f_c$. We show that one can super-resolve these point sources with infinite precision---i.e. recover the exact locations and amplitudes---by solving a simple convex optimization problem, which can essentially be reformulated as a semidefinite program. This holds provided that the distance between sources is at least $2/f_c$. This result extends to higher dimensions and other models. In one dimension for instance, it is possible to recover a piecewise smooth function by resolving the discontinuity points with infinite precision as well. We also show that the theory and methods are robust to noise. In particular, in the discrete setting we develop some theoretical results explaining how the accuracy of the super-resolved signal is expected to degrade when both the noise level and the {\em super-resolution factor} vary.Comment: 48 pages, 12 figure