Measure What Should be Measured: Progress and Challenges in Compressive Sensing

Is compressive sensing overrated? Or can it live up to our expectations? What will come after compressive sensing and sparsity? And what has Galileo Galilei got to do with it? Compressive sensing has taken the signal processing community by storm. A large corpus of research devoted to the theory and numerics of compressive sensing has been published in the last few years. Moreover, compressive sensing has inspired and initiated intriguing new research directions, such as matrix completion. Potential new applications emerge at a dazzling rate. Yet some important theoretical questions remain open, and seemingly obvious applications keep escaping the grip of compressive sensing. In this paper I discuss some of the recent progress in compressive sensing and point out key challenges and opportunities as the area of compressive sensing and sparse representations keeps evolving. I also attempt to assess the long-term impact of compressive sensing

A Levinson-Galerkin algorithm for regularized trigonometric approximation

Trigonometric polynomials are widely used for the approximation of a smooth function $f$ from a set of nonuniformly spaced samples $\{f(x_j)\}_{j=0}^{N-1}$. If the samples are perturbed by noise, controlling the smoothness of the trigonometric approximation becomes an essential issue to avoid overfitting and underfitting of the data. Using the polynomial degree as regularization parameter we derive a multi-level algorithm that iteratively adapts to the least squares solution of optimal smoothness. The proposed algorithm computes the solution in at most $\cal{O}(NM + M^2)$ operations ($M$ being the polynomial degree of the approximation) by solving a family of nested Toeplitz systems. It is shown how the presented method can be extended to multivariate trigonometric approximation. We demonstrate the performance of the algorithm by applying it in echocardiography to the recovery of the boundary of the Left Ventricle

Rates of convergence for the approximation of dual shift-invariant systems in l2(Z)l_2(Z)

A shift-invariant system is a collection of functions $\{g_{m,n}\}$ of the form $g_{m,n}(k) = g_m(k-an)$. Such systems play an important role in time-frequency analysis and digital signal processing. A principal problem is to find a dual system $\gamma_{m,n}(k) = \gamma_m(k-an)$ such that each function $f$ can be written as $f = \sum g_{m,n}$. The mathematical theory usually addresses this problem in infinite dimensions (typically in $L_2(R)$ or $l_2(Z)$), whereas numerical methods have to operate with a finite-dimensional model. Exploiting the link between the frame operator and Laurent operators with matrix-valued symbol, we apply the finite section method to show that the dual functions obtained by solving a finite-dimensional problem converge to the dual functions of the original infinite-dimensional problem in $l_2(Z)$. For compactly supported $g_{m,n}$ (FIR filter banks) we prove an exponential rate of convergence and derive explicit expressions for the involved constants. Further we investigate under which conditions one can replace the discrete model of the finite section method by the periodic discrete model, which is used in many numerical procedures. Again we provide explicit estimates for the speed of convergence. Some remarks on tight frames complete the paper

Approximation of dual Gabor frames, window decay, and wireless communications

We consider three problems for Gabor frames that have recently received much attention. The first problem concerns the approximation of dual Gabor frames in $L_2(R)$ by finite-dimensional methods. Utilizing Wexler-Raz type duality relations we derive a method to approximate the dual Gabor frame, that is much simpler than previously proposed techniques. Furthermore it enables us to give estimates for the approximation rate when the dimension of the finite model approaches infinity. The second problem concerns the relation between the decay of the window function $g$ and its dual $\gamma$. Based on results on commutative Banach algebras and Laurent operators we derive a general condition under which the dual $\gamma$ inherits the decay properties of $g$. The third problem concerns the design of pulse shapes for orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) systems for time- and frequency dispersive channels. In particular, we provide a theoretical foundation for a recently proposed algorithm to construct orthogonal transmission functions that are well localized in the time-frequency plane

Painless Breakups -- Efficient Demixing of Low Rank Matrices

Assume we are given a sum of linear measurements of $s$ different rank-$r$ matrices of the form $y = \sum_{k=1}^{s} \mathcal{A}_k ({X}_k)$. When and under which conditions is it possible to extract (demix) the individual matrices ${X}_k$ from the single measurement vector ${y}$? And can we do the demixing numerically efficiently? We present two computationally efficient algorithms based on hard thresholding to solve this low rank demixing problem. We prove that under suitable conditions these algorithms are guaranteed to converge to the correct solution at a linear rate. We discuss applications in connection with quantum tomography and the Internet-of-Things. Numerical simulations demonstrate empirically the performance of the proposed algorithms

A multi-level algorithm for the solution of moment problems

We study numerical methods for the solution of general linear moment problems, where the solution belongs to a family of nested subspaces of a Hilbert space. Multi-level algorithms, based on the conjugate gradient method and the Landweber--Richardson method are proposed that determine the "optimal" reconstruction level a posteriori from quantities that arise during the numerical calculations. As an important example we discuss the reconstruction of band-limited signals from irregularly spaced noisy samples, when the actual bandwidth of the signal is not available. Numerical examples show the usefulness of the proposed algorithms

Fast multi-dimensional scattered data approximation with Neumann boundary conditions

An important problem in applications is the approximation of a function $f$ from a finite set of randomly scattered data $f(x_j)$. A common and powerful approach is to construct a trigonometric least squares approximation based on the set of exponentials $\{e^{2\pi i kx}\}$. This leads to fast numerical algorithms, but suffers from disturbing boundary effects due to the underlying periodicity assumption on the data, an assumption that is rarely satisfied in practice. To overcome this drawback we impose Neumann boundary conditions on the data. This implies the use of cosine polynomials $\cos (\pi kx)$ as basis functions. We show that scattered data approximation using cosine polynomials leads to a least squares problem involving certain Toeplitz+Hankel matrices. We derive estimates on the condition number of these matrices. Unlike other Toeplitz+Hankel matrices, the Toeplitz+Hankel matrices arising in our context cannot be diagonalized by the discrete cosine transform, but they still allow a fast matrix-vector multiplication via DCT which gives rise to fast conjugate gradient type algorithms. We show how the results can be generalized to higher dimensions. Finally we demonstrate the performance of the proposed method by applying it to a two-dimensional geophysical scattered data problem

Analysis of Sparse MIMO Radar

We consider a multiple-input-multiple-output radar system and derive a theoretical framework for the recoverability of targets in the azimuth-range domain and the azimuth-range-Doppler domain via sparse approximation algorithms. Using tools developed in the area of compressive sensing, we prove bounds on the number of detectable targets and the achievable resolution in the presence of additive noise. Our theoretical findings are validated by numerical simulations

Sparsity Enhanced Decision Feedback Equalization

For single-carrier systems with frequency domain equalization, decision feedback equalization (DFE) performs better than linear equalization and has much lower computational complexity than sequence maximum likelihood detection. The main challenge in DFE is the feedback symbol selection rule. In this paper, we give a theoretical framework for a simple, sparsity based thresholding algorithm. We feed back multiple symbols in each iteration, so the algorithm converges fast and has a low computational cost. We show how the initial solution can be obtained via convex relaxation instead of linear equalization, and illustrate the impact that the choice of the initial solution has on the bit error rate performance of our algorithm. The algorithm is applicable in several existing wireless communication systems (SC-FDMA, MC-CDMA, MIMO-OFDM). Numerical results illustrate significant performance improvement in terms of bit error rate compared to the MMSE solution