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 Compressed Sensing Overview

Compressed Sensing Overview

Compressed sensing (CS) is a theory which states that, assuming some conditions are met, a vector can be compressed and sampled simultaneously (hence the name).

Assume we have a signal xRN. We further assume that there exists an invertible N × N transform matrix Ψ such that

x = Ψs (1)

where s is a K-sparse vector, i.e., ‖s0 = K with K < N, and where ‖·‖p represents p-norm. This means that the image has a sparse representation in some transformed domain, e.g., wavelet. The signal is measured by taking M < N linear combinations as

y = Φx = Φs = Ψ̃s (2)

It would initially seem that since M < N there would be no way to recover x. However, it was proven that if the measurement matrix Φ is sufficiently incoherent with respect to the sparsifying matrix Ψ, and K is smaller than a given threshold (i.e., the sparse representation s of the original signal x is "sparse enough"), then the original x can be recovered by finding the sparsest solution that satisfies (2). However, the problem above is, in general, NP-hard, but if Ψ̃ obeys the restricted isometry principal (RIP), then the original signal can be determined through the optimization problem

P1: minimize ‖s1  
  
subject to :‖y - Ψ̃s 2 < ϵ
2
(3)

where ϵ is a small tolerance. Note that problem P1 is a convex optimization problem. The reconstruction complexity is O(M2N32) if the problem is solved using interior point methods.

To learn more about various applications of compressed sensing, check out the following links: