Conventional wisdom and common practice in acquisition and reconstruction of images from frequency data follow the basic principle of the Nyquist density sampling theory. This principle states that to reconstruct an image, the number of Fourier samples we need to acquire must match the desired resolution of the image, i.e. the number of pixels in the image. This paper surveys an emerging theory which goes by the name of “compressive sampling” or “compressed sensing,” and which says that this conventional wisdom is inaccurate. Perhaps surprisingly, it is possible to reconstruct images or signals of scientific interest accurately and sometimes even exactly from a number of samples which is far smaller than the desired resolution of the image/signal, e.g. the number of pixels in the image. It is believed that compressive sampling has far reaching implications. For example, it suggests the possibility of new data acquisition protocols that translate analog information into digital form with fewer sensors than what was considered necessary. This new sampling theory may come to underlie procedures for sampling and compressing data simultaneously. In this short survey, we provide some of the key mathematical insights underlying this new theory, and explain some of the interactions between compressive sampling and other fields such as statistics, information theory, coding theory, and theoretical computer science.

This paper considers the classical error correcting problem which is frequently discussed in coding theory. We wish to recover an input vector f ∈ Rn from corrupted measurements y = Af + e. Here, A is an m by n (coding) matrix and e is an arbitrary and unknown vector of errors. Is it possible to recover f exactly from the data y? We prove that under suitable conditions on the coding matrix A, the input f is the unique solution to the ℓ1-minimization problem (‖x‖ℓ1:= i |xi|) min g∈R n ‖y − Ag‖ℓ1 provided that the support of the vector of errors is not too large, ‖e‖ℓ0: = |{i: ei ̸= 0} | ≤ ρ · m for some ρ> 0. In short, f can be recovered exactly by solving a simple convex optimization problem (which one can recast as a linear program). In addition, numerical experiments suggest that this recovery procedure works unreasonably well; f is recovered exactly even in situations where a significant fraction of the output is corrupted. This work is related to the problem of finding sparse solutions to vastly underdetermined systems of linear equations. There are also significant connections with the problem of recovering signals from highly incomplete measurements. In fact, the results introduced in this paper improve on our earlier work [5]. Finally, underlying the success of ℓ1 is a crucial property we call the uniform uncertainty principle that we shall describe in detail.

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We consider the problem of automatically recognizing human faces from frontal views with varying expression and illumination, as well as occlusion and disguise. We cast the recognition problem as one of classifying among multiple linear regression models, and argue that new theory from sparse signal representation offers the key to addressing this problem. Based on a sparse representation computed by ℓ 1-minimization, we propose a general classification algorithm for (image-based) object recognition. This new framework provides new insights into two crucial issues in face recognition: feature extraction and robustness to occlusion. For feature extraction, we show that if sparsity in the recognition problem is properly harnessed, the choice of features is no longer critical. What is critical, however, is whether the number of features is sufficiently large and whether the sparse representation is correctly computed. Unconventional features such as downsampled images and random projections perform just as well as conventional features such as Eigenfaces and Laplacianfaces, as long as the dimension of the feature space surpasses certain threshold, predicted by the theory of sparse representation. This framework can handle errors due to occlusion and corruption uniformly, by exploiting the fact that these errors are often sparse w.r.t. to the standard (pixel) basis. The theory of sparse representation helps predict how much occlusion the recognition algorithm can handle and how to choose the training images to maximize robustness to occlusion. We conduct extensive experiments on publicly available databases to verify the efficacy of the proposed algorithm, and corroborate the above claims.

In many important statistical applications, the number of variables or parameters p is much larger than the number of observations n. Suppose then that we have observations y = Xβ + z, where β ∈ Rp is a parameter vector of interest, X is a data matrix with possibly far fewer rows than columns, n ≪ p, and the zi’s are i.i.d. N(0,σ2). Is it possible to estimate β reliably based on the noisy data y? To estimate β, we introduce a new estimator—we call it the Dantzig selector—which is a solution to the ℓ1-regularization problem min ˜β∈R p ‖ ˜β‖ℓ1 subject to ‖X ∗ r‖ℓ ∞ ≤ (1 + t−1 √) 2logp · σ, where r is the residual vector y − X ˜β and t is a positive scalar. We show that if X obeys a uniform uncertainty principle (with unit-normed columns) and if the true parameter vector β is sufficiently sparse (which here roughly guarantees that the model is identifiable), then with very large probability,

We consider a problem of considerable practical interest: the recovery of a data matrix from a sampling of its entries. Suppose that we observe m entries selected uniformly at random from a matrix M. Can we complete the matrix and recover the entries that we have not seen? We show that one can perfectly recover most low-rank matrices from what appears to be an incomplete set of entries. We prove that if the number m of sampled entries obeys m ≥ C n 1.2 r log n for some positive numerical constant C, then with very high probability, most n × n matrices of rank r can be perfectly recovered by solving a simple convex optimization program. This program finds the matrix with minimum nuclear norm that fits the data. The condition above assumes that the rank is not too large. However, if one replaces the 1.2 exponent with 1.25, then the result holds for all values of the rank. Similar results hold for arbitrary rectangular matrices as well. Our results are connected with the recent literature on compressed sensing, and show that objects other than signals and images can be perfectly reconstructed from very limited information.

This technical report demonstrates theoretically and empirically that a greedy algorithm called Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) can reliably recover a signal with m nonzero entries in dimension d given O(m ln d) random linear measurements of that signal. This is a massive improvement over previous results for OMP, which require O(m 2) measurements. The new results for OMP are comparable with recent results for another algorithm called Basis Pursuit (BP). The OMP algorithm is faster and easier to implement, which makes it an attractive alternative to BP for signal recovery problems.

Abstract. Compressive sampling offers a new paradigm for acquiring signals that are compressible with respect to an orthonormal basis. The major algorithmic challenge in compressive sampling is to approximate a compressible signal from noisy samples. This paper describes a new iterative recovery algorithm called CoSaMP that delivers the same guarantees as the best optimization-based approaches. Moreover, this algorithm offers rigorous bounds on computational cost and storage. It is likely to be extremely efficient for practical problems because it requires only matrix–vector multiplies with the sampling matrix. For compressible signals, the running time is just O(N log 2 N), where N is the length of the signal. 1.

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