We consider the class of Iterative Shrinkage-Thresholding Algorithms (ISTA) for solving linear inverse problems arising in signal/image processing. This class of methods is attractive due to its simplicity, however, they are also known to converge quite slowly. In this paper we present a Fast Iterative Shrinkage-Thresholding Algorithm (FISTA) which preserves the computational simplicity of ISTA, but with a global rate of convergence which is proven to be significantly better, both theoretically and practically. Initial promising numerical results for wavelet-based image deblurring demonstrate the capabilities of FISTA.

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We develop fast algorithms for estimation of generalized linear models with convex penalties. The models include linear regression, twoclass logistic regression, and multinomial regression problems while the penalties include ℓ1 (the lasso), ℓ2 (ridge regression) and mixtures of the two (the elastic net). The algorithms use cyclical coordinate descent, computed along a regularization path. The methods can handle large problems and can also deal efficiently with sparse features. In comparative timings we find that the new algorithms are considerably faster than competing methods.

The Shannon/Nyquist sampling theorem tells us that in order to not lose information when uniformly sampling a signal we must sample at least two times faster than its bandwidth. In many applications, including digital image and video cameras, the Nyquist rate can be so high that we end up with too many samples and must compress in order to store or transmit them. In other applications, including imaging systems (medical scanners, radars) and high-speed analog-to-digital converters, increasing the sampling rate or density beyond the current state-of-the-art is very expensive. In this lecture, we will learn about a new technique that tackles these issues using compressive sensing [1, 2]. We will replace the conventional sampling and reconstruction operations with a more general linear measurement scheme coupled with an optimization in order to acquire certain kinds of signals at a rate significantly below Nyquist. 2

This paper introduces a novel algorithm to approximate the matrix with minimum nuclear norm among all matrices obeying a set of convex constraints. This problem may be understood as the convex relaxation of a rank minimization problem, and arises in many important applications as in the task of recovering a large matrix from a small subset of its entries (the famous Netflix problem). Off-the-shelf algorithms such as interior point methods are not directly amenable to large problems of this kind with over a million unknown entries. This paper develops a simple first-order and easy-to-implement algorithm that is extremely efficient at addressing problems in which the optimal solution has low rank. The algorithm is iterative and produces a sequence of matrices {X k, Y k} and at each step, mainly performs a soft-thresholding operation on the singular values of the matrix Y k. There are two remarkable features making this attractive for low-rank matrix completion problems. The first is that the soft-thresholding operation is applied to a sparse matrix; the second is that the rank of the iterates {X k} is empirically nondecreasing. Both these facts allow the algorithm to make use of very minimal storage space and keep the computational cost of each iteration low. On

We show that various inverse problems in signal recovery can be formulated as the generic problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions with certain regularity properties. This formulation makes it possible to derive existence, uniqueness, characterization, and stability results in a unified and standardized fashion for a large class of apparently disparate problems. Recent results on monotone operator splitting methods are applied to establish the convergence of a forward-backward algorithm to solve the generic problem. In turn, we recover, extend, and provide a simplified analysis for a variety of existing iterative methods. Applications to geometry/texture image decomposition schemes are also discussed. A novelty of our framework is to use extensively the notion of a proximity operator, which was introduced by Moreau in the 1960s.

This paper studies a difficult and fundamental problem that arises throughout electrical engineering, applied mathematics, and statistics. Suppose that one forms a short linear combination of elementary signals drawn from a large, fixed collection. Given an observation of the linear combination that has been contaminated with additive noise, the goal is to identify which elementary signals participated and to approximate their coefficients. Although many algorithms have been proposed, there is little theory which guarantees that these algorithms can accurately and efficiently solve the problem. This paper studies a method called convex relaxation, which attempts to recover the ideal sparse signal by solving a convex program. This approach is powerful because the optimization can be completed in polynomial time with standard scientific software. The paper provides general conditions which ensure that convex relaxation succeeds. As evidence of the broad impact of these results, the paper describes how convex relaxation can be used for several concrete signal recovery problems. It also describes applications to channel coding, linear regression, and numerical analysis.

A full-rank matrix A ∈ IR n×m with n < m generates an underdetermined system of linear equations Ax = b having infinitely many solutions. Suppose we seek the sparsest solution, i.e., the one with the fewest nonzero entries: can it ever be unique? If so, when? As optimization of sparsity is combinatorial in nature, are there efficient methods for finding the sparsest solution? These questions have been answered positively and constructively in recent years, exposing a wide variety of surprising phenomena; in particular, the existence of easily-verifiable conditions under which optimally-sparse solutions can be found by concrete, effective computational methods. Such theoretical results inspire a bold perspective on some important practical problems in signal and image processing. Several well-known signal and image processing problems can be cast as demanding solutions of undetermined systems of equations. Such problems have previously seemed, to many, intractable. There is considerable evidence that these problems often have sparse solutions. Hence, advances in finding sparse solutions to underdetermined systems energizes research on such signal and image processing problems – to striking effect. In this paper we review the theoretical results on sparse solutions of linear systems, empirical

Finding sparse approximate solutions to large underdetermined linear systems of equations is a common problem in signal/image processing and statistics. Basis pursuit, the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), wavelet-based deconvolution and reconstruction, and compressed sensing (CS) are a few well-known areas in which problems of this type appear. One standard approach is to minimize an objective function that includes a quadratic (ℓ2) error term added to a sparsity-inducing (usually ℓ1) regularizer. We present an algorithmic framework for the more general problem of minimizing the sum of a smooth convex function and a nonsmooth, possibly nonconvex, sparsity-inducing function. We propose iterative methods in which each step is an optimization subproblem involving a separable quadratic term (diagonal Hessian) plus the original sparsity-inducing term. Our approach is suitable for cases in which this subproblem can be solved much more rapidly than the original problem. In addition to solving the standard ℓ2 − ℓ1 case, our approach handles other problems, e.g., ℓp regularizers with p � = 1, or group-separable (GS) regularizers. Experiments with CS problems show that our approach provides state-of-the-art speed for the standard ℓ2 − ℓ1 problem, and is also efficient on problems with GS regularizers. Index Terms — sparse approximation, compressed sensing, optimization, reconstruction.

This paper introduces an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for image restoration (deconvolution) based on a penalized likelihood formulated in the wavelet domain. Regularization is achieved by promoting a reconstruction with low-complexity, expressed in terms of the wavelet coecients, taking advantage of the well known sparsity of wavelet representations. Previous works have investigated wavelet-based restoration but, except for certain special cases, the resulting criteria are solved approximately or require very demanding optimization methods. The EM algorithm herein proposed combines the efficient image representation oered by the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) with the diagonalization of the convolution operator obtained in the Fourier domain. The algorithm alternates between an E-step based on the fast Fourier transform (FFT) and a DWT-based M-step, resulting in an ecient iterative process requiring O(N log N) operations per iteration. Thus, it is the rst image restoration algorithm that optimizes a wavelet-based penalized likelihood criterion and has computational complexity comparable to that of standard wavelet denoising or frequency domain deconvolution methods. The convergence behavior of the algorithm is investigated, and it is shown that under mild conditions the algorithm converges to a globally optimal restoration. Moreover, our new approach outperforms several of the best existing methods in benchmark tests, and in some cases is also much less computationally demanding.