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.

Abstract Suppose we wish to recover a vector x 0 ∈ R m (e.g., a digital signal or image) from incomplete and contaminated observations y = Ax 0 + e; A is an n × m matrix with far fewer rows than columns (n m) and e is an error term. Is it possible to recover x 0 accurately based on the data y? To recover x 0 , we consider the solution x to the 1 -regularization problem where is the size of the error term e. We show that if A obeys a uniform uncertainty principle (with unit-normed columns) and if the vector x 0 is sufficiently sparse, then the solution is within the noise level As a first example, suppose that A is a Gaussian random matrix; then stable recovery occurs for almost all such A's provided that the number of nonzeros of x 0 is of about the same order as the number of observations. As a second instance, suppose one observes few Fourier samples of x 0 ; then stable recovery occurs for almost any set of n coefficients provided that the number of nonzeros is of the order of n/(log m) 6 . In the case where the error term vanishes, the recovery is of course exact, and this work actually provides novel insights into the exact recovery phenomenon discussed in earlier papers. The methodology also explains why one can also very nearly recover approximately sparse signals.

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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 = Ax + z, where x ∈ R p is a parameter vector of interest, A is a data matrix with possibly far fewer rows than columns, n ≪ p, and the zi’s are i.i.d. N(0, σ 2). Is it possible to estimate x reliably based on the noisy data y? To estimate x, we introduce a new estimator—we call the Dantzig selector—which is solution to the ℓ1-regularization problem min ˜x∈R p ‖˜x‖ℓ1 subject to ‖A T r‖ℓ ∞ ≤ (1 + t −1) √ 2 log p · σ, where r is the residual vector y − A˜x and t is a positive scalar. We show that if A obeys a uniform uncertainty principle (with unit-normed columns) and if the true parameter vector x is sufficiently sparse (which here roughly guarantees that the model is identifiable), then with very large probability ‖ˆx − x ‖ 2 ℓ2 ≤ C2 ( · 2 log p · σ 2 + ∑ min(x 2 i, σ 2) Our results are nonasymptotic and we give values for the constant C. In short, our estimator achieves a loss within a logarithmic factor of the ideal mean squared error one would achieve with an oracle which would supply perfect information about which coordinates are nonzero, and which were above the noise level. In multivariate regression and from a model selection viewpoint, our result says that it is possible nearly to select the best subset of variables, by solving a very simple convex program, which in fact can easily be recast as a convenient linear program (LP).

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