Block-Sparse Recovery via Convex Optimization

Given a dictionary that consists of multiple blocks and a signal that lives in the range space of only a few blocks, we study the problem of finding a block-sparse representation of the signal, i.e., a representation that uses the minimum number of blocks. Motivated by signal/image processing and computer vision applications, such as face recognition, we consider the block-sparse recovery problem in the case where the number of atoms in each block is arbitrary, possibly much larger than the dimension of the underlying subspace. To find a block-sparse representation of a signal, we propose two classes of non-convex optimization programs, which aim to minimize the number of nonzero coefficient blocks and the number of nonzero reconstructed vectors from the blocks, respectively. Since both classes of problems are NP-hard, we propose convex relaxations and derive conditions under which each class of the convex programs is equivalent to the original non-convex formulation. Our conditions depend on the notions of mutual and cumulative subspace coherence of a dictionary, which are natural generalizations of existing notions of mutual and cumulative coherence. We evaluate the performance of the proposed convex programs through simulations as well as real experiments on face recognition. We show that treating the face recognition problem as a block-sparse recovery problem improves the state-of-the-art results by 10% with only 25% of the training data.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Sparse Recovery from Combined Fusion Frame Measurements

Sparse representations have emerged as a powerful tool in signal and information processing, culminated by the success of new acquisition and processing techniques such as Compressed Sensing (CS). Fusion frames are very rich new signal representation methods that use collections of subspaces instead of vectors to represent signals. This work combines these exciting fields to introduce a new sparsity model for fusion frames. Signals that are sparse under the new model can be compressively sampled and uniquely reconstructed in ways similar to sparse signals using standard CS. The combination provides a promising new set of mathematical tools and signal models useful in a variety of applications. With the new model, a sparse signal has energy in very few of the subspaces of the fusion frame, although it does not need to be sparse within each of the subspaces it occupies. This sparsity model is captured using a mixed l1/l2 norm for fusion frames. A signal sparse in a fusion frame can be sampled using very few random projections and exactly reconstructed using a convex optimization that minimizes this mixed l1/l2 norm. The provided sampling conditions generalize coherence and RIP conditions used in standard CS theory. It is demonstrated that they are sufficient to guarantee sparse recovery of any signal sparse in our model. Moreover, a probabilistic analysis is provided using a stochastic model on the sparse signal that shows that under very mild conditions the probability of recovery failure decays exponentially with increasing dimension of the subspaces