Theoretical results show that sparse off-the-grid spikes can be estimated from (possibly compressive) Fourier measurements under a minimum separation assumption. We propose a practical algorithm to minimize the corresponding non-convex functional based on a projected gradient descent coupled with an initialization procedure. We give qualitative insights on the theoretical foundations of the algorithm and provide experiments showing its potential for imaging problems.
This article analyzes the recovery performance of two popular finite dimensional approximations of the sparse spikes deconvolution problem over Radon measures. We examine in a unified framework both the L1 regularization (often referred to as Lasso or Basis-Pursuit) and the Continuous Basis-Pursuit (C-BP) methods. The Lasso is the de-facto standard for the sparse regularization of inverse problems in imaging. It performs a nearest neighbor interpolation of the spikes locations on the sampling grid. The C-BP method, introduced by Ekanadham, Tranchina and Simoncelli, uses a linear interpolation …
We study sparse spikes deconvolution over the space of Radon measures on $\mathbb{R}$ or $\mathbb{T}$ when the input measure is a finite sum of positive Dirac masses using the BLASSO convex program. We focus on the recovery properties of the support and the amplitudes of the initial measure in the presence of noise as a function of the minimum separation $t$ of the input measure (the minimum distance between two spikes). We show that when ${w}/λ$, ${w}/t^{2N-1}$ and $λ/t^{2N-1}$ are small enough (where $λ$ is the regularization parameter, $w$ the noise and $N$ the number of spikes), which corr…
The sparse spike estimation problem consists in estimating a number of off-the-grid impulsive sources from under-determined linear measurements. Information theoretic results ensure that the minimization of a non-convex functional is able to recover the spikes for adequately chosen measurements (deterministic or random). To solve this problem, methods inspired from the case of finite dimensional sparse estimation where a convex program is used have been proposed. Also greedy heuristics have shown nice practical results. However, little is known on the ideal non-convex minimization method. In t…
This note considers the problem of approximating the locations of dominant spikes for a probability measure from noisy spectrum measurements under the condition of residue signal, significant noise level, and no minimum spectrum separation. We show that the simple procedure of thresholding the smoothed inverse Fourier transform allows for approximating the spike locations rather accurately.
In this work, super-resolution by 4 compressive sensing methods (OMP, BP, BLOOMP, BP-BLOT) with highly coherent partial Fourier measurements is comparatively studied. An alternative metric more suitable for gauging the quality of spike recovery is introduced and based on the concept of filtration with a parameter representing the level of tolerance for support offset. In terms of the filtered error norm only BLOOMP and BP-BLOT can perform grid-independent recovery of well separated spikes of Rayleigh index 1 for arbitrarily large super-resolution factor. Moreover both BLOOMP and BP-BLOT can lo…
Unlocking Off-the-Grid Sparse Recovery with Unlimited Sensing: Simultaneous Super-Resolution in Time and Amplitude
Computational Sensing and Imaging Lab (CSIL) at the Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engg., Imperial College London（计算感知与成像实验室（CSIL）位于帝国理工学院伦敦电子与电气工程系）
Neural recordings, returns from radars and sonars, images in astronomy and single-molecule microscopy can be modeled as a linear superposition of a small number of scaled and delayed copies of a band-limited or diffraction-limited point spread function, which is either determined by the nature or designed by the users; in other words, we observe the convolution between a point spread function and a sparse spike signal with unknown amplitudes and delays. While it is of great interest to accurately resolve the spike signal from as few samples as possible, however, when the point spread function …
Sparse regularization is a central technique for both machine learning (to achieve supervised features selection or unsupervised mixture learning) and imaging sciences (to achieve super-resolution). Existing performance guaranties assume a separation of the spikes based on an ad-hoc (usually Euclidean) minimum distance condition, which ignores the geometry of the problem. In this article, we study the BLASSO (i.e. the off-the-grid version of $\ell^1$ LASSO regularization) and show that the Fisher-Rao distance is the natural way to ensure and quantify support recovery, since it preserves the in…
Super-resolution estimation is the problem of recovering a stream of spikes (point sources) from the noisy observation of a few numbers of its first trigonometric moments. The performance of super-resolution is recognized to be intimately related to the separation between the spikes to recover. A novel notion of stability of the Fisher information matrix (FIM) of the super-resolution problem is introduced when the minimal eigenvalue of the FIM is not asymptotically vanishing. The regime where the minimal separation is inversely proportional to the number of acquired moments is considered. It i…
We consider simultaneously identifying the membership and locations of point sources that are convolved with different band-limited point spread functions, from the observation of their superpositions. This problem arises in three-dimensional super-resolution single-molecule imaging, neural spike sorting, multi-user channel identification, among other applications. We propose a novel algorithm, based on convex programming, and establish its near-optimal performance guarantee for exact recovery in the noise-free setting by exploiting the spectral sparsity of the point source models as well as t…
We address the problem of estimating time and frequency shifts of a known waveform in the presence of multiple measurement vectors (MMVs). This problem naturally arises in radar imaging and wireless communications. Specifically, a signal ensemble is observed, where each signal of the ensemble is formed by a superposition of a small number of scaled, time-delayed, and frequency shifted versions of a known waveform sharing the same continuous-valued time and frequency components. The goal is to recover the continuous-valued time-frequency pairs from a small number of observations. In this work, …
Non-convex methods for linear inverse problems with low-dimensional models have emerged as an alternative to convex techniques. We propose a theoretical framework where both finite dimensional and infinite dimensional linear inverse problems can be studied. We show how the size of the the basins of attraction of the minimizers of such problems is linked with the number of available measurements. This framework recovers known results about low-rank matrix estimation and off-the-grid sparse spike estimation, and it provides new results for Gaussian mixture estimation from linear measurements. ke…
This paper presents a sharp geometric analysis of the recovery performance of sparse regularization. More specifically, we analyze the BLASSO method which estimates a sparse measure (sum of Dirac masses) from randomized sub-sampled measurements. This is a "continuous", often called off-the-grid, extension of the compressed sensing problem, where the $\ell^1$ norm is replaced by the total variation of measures. This extension is appealing from a numerical perspective because it avoids to discretize the the space by some grid. But more importantly, it makes explicit the geometry of the problem s…
