Lorentzian Iterative Hard Thresholding: Robust Compressed Sensing with Prior Information

Commonly employed reconstruction algorithms in compressed sensing (CS) use the $L_2$ norm as the metric for the residual error. However, it is well-known that least squares (LS) based estimators are highly sensitive to outliers present in the measurement vector leading to a poor performance when the noise no longer follows the Gaussian assumption but, instead, is better characterized by heavier-than-Gaussian tailed distributions. In this paper, we propose a robust iterative hard Thresholding (IHT) algorithm for reconstructing sparse signals in the presence of impulsive noise. To address this problem, we use a Lorentzian cost function instead of the $L_2$ cost function employed by the traditional IHT algorithm. We also modify the algorithm to incorporate prior signal information in the recovery process. Specifically, we study the case of CS with partially known support. The proposed algorithm is a fast method with computational load comparable to the LS based IHT, whilst having the advantage of robustness against heavy-tailed impulsive noise. Sufficient conditions for stability are studied and a reconstruction error bound is derived. We also derive sufficient conditions for stable sparse signal recovery with partially known support. Theoretical analysis shows that including prior support information relaxes the conditions for successful reconstruction. Simulation results demonstrate that the Lorentzian-based IHT algorithm significantly outperform commonly employed sparse reconstruction techniques in impulsive environments, while providing comparable performance in less demanding, light-tailed environments. Numerical results also demonstrate that the partially known support inclusion improves the performance of the proposed algorithm, thereby requiring fewer samples to yield an approximate reconstruction.Comment: 28 pages, 9 figures, accepted in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

PURIFY: a new algorithmic framework for next-generation radio-interferometric imaging

In recent works, compressed sensing (CS) and convex opti- mization techniques have been applied to radio-interferometric imaging showing the potential to outperform state-of-the-art imaging algorithms in the field. We review our latest contributions [1, 2, 3], which leverage the versatility of convex optimization to both handle realistic continuous visibilities and offer a highly parallelizable structure paving the way to significant acceleration of the reconstruction and high-dimensional data scalability. The new algorithmic structure promoted in a new software PURIFY (beta version) relies on the simultaneous-direction method of multipliers (SDMM). The performance of various sparsity priors is evaluated through simulations in the continuous visibility setting, confirming the superiority of our recent average sparsity approach SARA

On sparsity averaging

Recent developments in Carrillo et al. (2012) and Carrillo et al. (2013) introduced a novel regularization method for compressive imaging in the context of compressed sensing with coherent redundant dictionaries. The approach relies on the observation that natural images exhibit strong average sparsity over multiple coherent frames. The associated reconstruction algorithm, based on an analysis prior and a reweighted $\ell_1$ scheme, is dubbed Sparsity Averaging Reweighted Analysis (SARA). We review these advances and extend associated simulations establishing the superiority of SARA to regularization methods based on sparsity in a single frame, for a generic spread spectrum acquisition and for a Fourier acquisition of particular interest in radio astronomy.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings of 10th International Conference on Sampling Theory and Applications (SampTA), Code available at https://github.com/basp-group/sopt, Full journal letter available at http://arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:1208.233

PURIFY: a new approach to radio-interferometric imaging

In a recent article series, the authors have promoted convex optimization algorithms for radio-interferometric imaging in the framework of compressed sensing, which leverages sparsity regularization priors for the associated inverse problem and defines a minimization problem for image reconstruction. This approach was shown, in theory and through simulations in a simple discrete visibility setting, to have the potential to outperform significantly CLEAN and its evolutions. In this work, we leverage the versatility of convex optimization in solving minimization problems to both handle realistic continuous visibilities and offer a highly parallelizable structure paving the way to significant acceleration of the reconstruction and high-dimensional data scalability. The new algorithmic structure promoted relies on the simultaneous-direction method of multipliers (SDMM), and contrasts with the current major-minor cycle structure of CLEAN and its evolutions, which in particular cannot handle the state-of-the-art minimization problems under consideration where neither the regularization term nor the data term are differentiable functions. We release a beta version of an SDMM-based imaging software written in C and dubbed PURIFY (http://basp-group.github.io/purify/) that handles various sparsity priors, including our recent average sparsity approach SARA. We evaluate the performance of different priors through simulations in the continuous visibility setting, confirming the superiority of SARA

A randomised primal-dual algorithm for distributed radio-interferometric imaging

Next generation radio telescopes, like the Square Kilometre Array, will acquire an unprecedented amount of data for radio astronomy. The development of fast, parallelisable or distributed algorithms for handling such large-scale data sets is of prime importance. Motivated by this, we investigate herein a convex optimisation algorithmic structure, based on primal-dual forward-backward iterations, for solving the radio interferometric imaging problem. It can encompass any convex prior of interest. It allows for the distributed processing of the measured data and introduces further flexibility by employing a probabilistic approach for the selection of the data blocks used at a given iteration. We study the reconstruction performance with respect to the data distribution and we propose the use of nonuniform probabilities for the randomised updates. Our simulations show the feasibility of the randomisation given a limited computing infrastructure as well as important computational advantages when compared to state-of-the-art algorithmic structures.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings of the European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) 2016, Related journal publication available at https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.0402

Exploiting Prior Knowledge in Compressed Sensing Wireless ECG Systems

Recent results in telecardiology show that compressed sensing (CS) is a promising tool to lower energy consumption in wireless body area networks for electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring. However, the performance of current CS-based algorithms, in terms of compression rate and reconstruction quality of the ECG, still falls short of the performance attained by state-of-the-art wavelet based algorithms. In this paper, we propose to exploit the structure of the wavelet representation of the ECG signal to boost the performance of CS-based methods for compression and reconstruction of ECG signals. More precisely, we incorporate prior information about the wavelet dependencies across scales into the reconstruction algorithms and exploit the high fraction of common support of the wavelet coefficients of consecutive ECG segments. Experimental results utilizing the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database show that significant performance gains, in terms of compression rate and reconstruction quality, can be obtained by the proposed algorithms compared to current CS-based methods.Comment: Accepted for publication at IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatic

The varying w spread spectrum effect for radio interferometric imaging

We study the impact of the spread spectrum effect in radio interferometry on the quality of image reconstruction. This spread spectrum effect will be induced by the wide field-of-view of forthcoming radio interferometric telescopes. The resulting chirp modulation improves the quality of reconstructed interferometric images by increasing the incoherence of the measurement and sparsity dictionaries. We extend previous studies of this effect to consider the more realistic setting where the chirp modulation varies for each visibility measurement made by the telescope. In these first preliminary results, we show that for this setting the quality of reconstruction improves significantly over the case without chirp modulation and achieves almost the reconstruction quality of the case of maximal, constant chirp modulation.Comment: 1 page, 1 figure, Proceedings of the Biomedical and Astronomical Signal Processing Frontiers (BASP) workshop 201

Robust sparse image reconstruction of radio interferometric observations with purify

Next-generation radio interferometers, such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), will revolutionise our understanding of the universe through their unprecedented sensitivity and resolution. However, to realise these goals significant challenges in image and data processing need to be overcome. The standard methods in radio interferometry for reconstructing images, such as CLEAN, have served the community well over the last few decades and have survived largely because they are pragmatic. However, they produce reconstructed inter\-ferometric images that are limited in quality and scalability for big data. In this work we apply and evaluate alternative interferometric reconstruction methods that make use of state-of-the-art sparse image reconstruction algorithms motivated by compressive sensing, which have been implemented in the PURIFY software package. In particular, we implement and apply the proximal alternating direction method of multipliers (P-ADMM) algorithm presented in a recent article. First, we assess the impact of the interpolation kernel used to perform gridding and degridding on sparse image reconstruction. We find that the Kaiser-Bessel interpolation kernel performs as well as prolate spheroidal wave functions, while providing a computational saving and an analytic form. Second, we apply PURIFY to real interferometric observations from the Very Large Array (VLA) and the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) and find images recovered by PURIFY are higher quality than those recovered by CLEAN. Third, we discuss how PURIFY reconstructions exhibit additional advantages over those recovered by CLEAN. The latest version of PURIFY, with developments presented in this work, is made publicly available.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures, PURIFY code available at http://basp-group.github.io/purif

Evaluation of the end-of-life of electric vehicle batteries according to the state-of-health

As a result of monitoring thousands of electric vehicle charges around Europe, this study builds statistical distributions that model the amount of energy necessary for trips between charges, showing that most of trips are within the range of electric vehicle even when the battery degradation reaches the end-of-life, commonly accepted to be 80% State of Health. According to these results, this study analyses how far this End-of-Life can be pushed forward using statistical methods and indicating the provability of failing to fulfill the electric vehicle (EV) owners’ daily trip needsPeer ReviewedPostprint (published version