• DOI:10.1109/TIT.2005.862083
• Corpus ID: 7033413

Robust uncertainty principles: exact signal reconstruction from highly incomplete frequency information

@article{Cands2006RobustUP,
  title={Robust uncertainty principles: exact signal reconstruction from highly incomplete frequency information},
  author={Emmanuel J. Cand{\`e}s and Justin K. Romberg and Terence Tao},
  journal={IEEE Transactions on Information Theory},
  year={2006},
  volume={52},
  pages={489-509}
}

• E. Candès, J. Romberg, T. Tao
• Published 10 September 2004
• Computer Science
• IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

This paper considers the model problem of reconstructing an object from incomplete frequency samples. Consider a discrete-time signal f/spl isin/C/sup N/ and a randomly chosen set of frequencies /spl Omega/. Is it possible to reconstruct f from the partial knowledge of its Fourier coefficients on the set /spl Omega/? A typical result of this paper is as follows. Suppose that f is a superposition of |T| spikes f(t)=/spl sigma//sub /spl tau//spl isin/T/f(/spl tau/)/spl delta/(t-/spl tau/) obeying |T|/spl les/C/sub M//spl middot/(log N)/sup -1/ /spl middot/ |/spl Omega/| for some constant C/sub M/>0. We do not know the locations of the spikes nor their amplitudes. Then with probability at least 1-O(N/sup -M/), f can be reconstructed exactly as the solution to the /spl lscr//sub 1/ minimization problem. In short, exact recovery may be obtained by solving a convex optimization problem. We give numerical values for C/sub M/ which depend on the desired probability of success. Our result may be interpreted as a novel kind of nonlinear sampling theorem. In effect, it says that any signal made out of |T| spikes may be recovered by convex programming from almost every set of frequencies of size O(|T|/spl middot/logN). Moreover, this is nearly optimal in the sense that any method succeeding with probability 1-O(N/sup -M/) would in general require a number of frequency samples at least proportional to |T|/spl middot/logN. The methodology extends to a variety of other situations and higher dimensions. For example, we show how one can reconstruct a piecewise constant (one- or two-dimensional) object from incomplete frequency samples - provided that the number of jumps (discontinuities) obeys the condition above - by minimizing other convex functionals such as the total variation of f.