Friday, December 16, 2011

Real-Time Principal Component Pursuit

Graeme Pope let me know that "[they] will make the source code available online as soon as [they] have clarified the licensing issues." Great! in the meantime, here is the paper:

Robust principal component analysis (RPCA) deals with the decomposition of a matrix into a low-rank matrix and a sparse matrix. Such decompositions find, for example, applications in video surveillance or face recognition. One effective way to solve RPCA problems is to use a convex optimization method known as principal component pursuit (PCP). The corresponding algorithms have, however, prohibitive computational complexity for certain applications that require real-time processing. In this paper, we propose a variety of methods that significantly reduce computational complexity. Furthermore, we perform a systematic analysis of the performance/complexity tradeoffs underlying PCP. For synthetic data, we show that our methods result in a speedup of more than 365 times compared to a base C implementation at only a small loss in terms of recovery performance. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we consider foreground/background separation for video surveillance, where our methods enable real-time processing of a 640×480 color video stream at 10 frames per second (fps) using an off-the-shelf PC.

As soon as the implementation is available, it will also be featured in the Matrix Factorization Jungle Page.






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Thursday, December 15, 2011

Implementation of Mallat's Scattering transform

A year ago, I mentioned the work of Stephane Mallat ( Mallat's Invariants). It looks he and his co-authors (Joan Bruna and Joakim Anden) released an implementation of their scattering transform that allows different signals featuring the same object and its translated/rotated companion to be compared to each other using the Euclidian norm Here is the video presentation of a year ago 
:

High dimensional classification by recursive interferometry
envoyé par Sciences_Maths_Paris. - Vidéos des dernières découvertes technologiques.



From the webpage:
Summary
A Scattering transform defines a signal representation which is locally invariant to translations and potentially to other groups of transformations such as rotations or scaling. It linearizes deformations and is thus well adapted to signal classification. A scattering transform is implemented with a convolutional network architecture, iterating over wavelet decompositions and complex modulus. This web page provides articles and softwares on scattering transforms and classification applications.

References
[1] Mathematical introduction of scattering operators for group invariant representations (78 pages): "Group Invariant Scattering" S. Mallat.
[2] Scattering transform review with an image classification algorithm (6 pages) : Classification with Scattering Operators" J. Bruna and S. Mallat. Proceedings of the IEEE CVPR 2011 conference.
[3] Scattering transform applied to audio signals and musical classification (6 pages) : Multiscale Scattering for Audio Classification" Joakim Andén and S. Mallat. Proceedings of the ISMIR 2011 conference. For Matlab code and reconstruction examples, see the audio section.
 The implementation is here.

Of interest, there is also this abstract : Convolution Networks with Stable Invariants by Joan Bruna and Stephane Mallat.

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redsvd: RandomizED Singular Value Decomposition



redsvd is a C++ library for solving several matrix decompositions including singular value decomposition (SVD), principal component analysis (PCA), and eigen value decomposition. redsvd can handle very large matrix efficiently, and optimized for a truncated SVD of sparse matrices. For example, redsvd can compute a truncated SVD with top 20 singular values for a 100K x 100K matrix with 1M nonzero entries in less than one second.
The algorithm is based on the randomized algorithm for computing large-scale SVD. Although it uses randomized matrices, the results is very accurate with very high probability.

It is evidently featured in the Matrix Factorization Jungle page.

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#NIPS2011 : Learning Sparse Representations of High Dimensional Data on Large Scale Dictionaries


This one paper is about both matrix factorization and one aspect of compressive sensing but I am featuring it alone here because unlike most NIPS submissions, the authors provide an implementation of their code. This is the norm in the compressive sensing community, it needs to be the norm in the generic area of  Matrix Factorization.

Learning sparse representations on data adaptive dictionaries is a state-of-the-art method for modeling data. But when the dictionary is large and the data dimension is high, it is a computationally challenging problem. We explore three aspects of the problem. First, we derive new, greatly improved screening tests that quickly identify codewords that are guaranteed to have zero weights. Second, we study the properties of random projections in the context of learning sparse representations. Finally, we develop a hierarchical framework that uses incremental random projections and screening to learn, in small stages, a hierarchically structured dictionary for sparse representations. Empirical results show that our framework can
learn informative hierarchical sparse representations more efficiently
The Supplemental material is here. The attendant MATLAB Toolbox will evidently be featured in the Matrix Factorization Jungle page.




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Tuesday, December 13, 2011

The Nuit Blanche Chronicles (2011)


The Nuit Blanche Chronicles for 2011 are out. Get it, it's free. This e-book/pdf lists all the entries on Nuit Blanche from Dec 10, 2010 till Dec 12, 2011.

The formatting is crap but it does two useful things: 
  • the blog can be read offline on a tablet, a nice thing when you want to unplug. 
  • The search feature within a pdf is likely much better than Google's. 

Enjoy!



Strobing high resolution camera with picosecond time resolution



For those of you wondering about the work of Andreas Velten and Ramesh Raskar, yes there is a compressive sensing aspect to this as the path taken by light can be decomposed in a series of smaller paths between bounces. The final measurement is a linear combination of the different times it took light to bounce from one object to the other.  Reconstruction of that signal should yield the physical scene lit by the picosecond laser. 

Liked this entry ? subscribe to Nuit Blanche's feed, there's more where that came from. You can also subscribe to Nuit Blanche by Email, explore the Big Picture in Compressive Sensing or the Matrix Factorization Jungle and join the conversations on compressive sensing, advanced matrix factorization and calibration issues on Linkedin.

Monday, December 12, 2011

Scenes and Images of Nuit Blanche

This is the time of the year when I put together the Nuit Blanche Chronicles. I am looking for a good looking image for the front and back of the pdf. I really don't know how Google does this but it looks most images from the blog are in four separate albums (the last one us the most recent). Here they are:





A new sensor, around the blogs in 80 hours and more: Compressive Sensing Edition

The compressive sensing group has more than 1182 members. The sitemeter counter tells us that there has been more than half a million visits in the past four years. 


In other news, Tianyi who is now at NIPS mentioned the draft of a new paper Compressed Labeling: An important extension of Hamming Compressed Sensing; at NIPS now. Eric has a post on PCA, Compressive Measurements, and VideoSergey Ten makes a connection between this paper and this paper. Laurent points to a way to perform some Tomography of the magnetic fields of the Milky Way. Finally, Bob talks about how the whole field on compressive sensing might already patented :-)

Bob  also produced the following: When “exact recovery” is exact recovery in compressive sampling by Bob Sturm. The abstract reads:

Work in compressed sensing employs at least two definitions of “exact recovery”: 1) all true support elements have been found; or 2) the normalized squared solution error is smaller than ǫ2. The significance of this parameter has yet to be analyzed. We show here that it prescribes a maximum allowed missed detection rate, and find when these criteria are equivalent.





The mathematical theory of compressed sensing (CS) asserts that one can acquire signals from measurements whose rate is much lower than the total bandwidth. Whereas the CS theory is now well developed, challenges concerning hardware implementations of CS-based acquisition devices—especially in optics—have only started being addressed. This paper presents an implementation of compressive sensing in fluorescence microscopy and its applications to biomedical imaging. Our CS microscope combines a dynamic structured wide-field illumination and a fast and sensitive single-point fluorescence detection to enable reconstructions of images of fluorescent beads, cells and tissues with undersampling ratios (between the number of pixels and number of measurements) up to 32. We further demonstrate a hyperspectral mode and record images with 128 spectral channels and undersampling ratios up to 64, illustrating the potential benefits of CS acquisition for higher dimensional signals which typically exhibits extreme redundancy. Altogether, our results emphasize the interest of CS schemes for acquisition at a significantly reduced rate and point out to some remaining challenges for CS fluorescence microscopy.




Concentration of Measure (CoM) inequalities are a useful tool for the analysis of randomized linear operators. In this work, we derive such inequalities for randomized compressive Toeplitz matrices, i.e., Toeplitz matrices that have fewer rows than columns and are populated with entries drawn from an independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Gaussian random sequence. These inequalities show that the norm of a high-dimensional signal mapped by a compressive Toeplitz matrix to a low-dimensional space concentrates around its mean with a tail probability bound that decays exponentially in the dimension of the range space divided by a quantity which is a function of the signal. This implies that the CoM inequalities for compressive Toeplitz matrices are non-uniform and signal-dependent. To this end, we also study the behavior of the introduced quantity. For example, we show that for the class of sparse signals, the introduced quantity is bounded by the sparsity level of the signal. However, this bound is highly pessimistic for most sparse signals and we show that if a random distribution is imposed on the non-zero entries of the signal, the typical value of the quantity is bounded by a term that scales logarithmically in the ambient dimension. Moreover, we extend our analysis for signals that are sparse in a generic orthobasis. To this end, we introduce the notion of the Fourier coherence of an arbitrary orthobasis and state our generic results based on this measure. Compressive Toeplitz matrices arise in problems involving the analysis of high-dimensional dynamical systems from consecutive convolution-based measurements. As applications of the CoM inequalities, we consider Compressive System Identification (CSI) and Compressive Binary Detection (CBD) problems and discuss the CoM inequalities in such applications




Efficient Marginal Likelihood Optimization in Blind Deconvolution by Anat LevinYair Weiss, Fredo Durand, William T. Freeman. The abstract reads:
In blind deconvolution one aims to estimate from an input blurred image y a sharp image x and an unknown blur kernel k. Recent research shows that a key to success is to consider the overall shape of the posterior distribution p(x, k|y) and not only its mode. This leads to a distinction between MAPx,k strategies which estimate the mode pair x, k and often lead to undesired results, and MAPk strategies which select the best k while marginalizing over all possible x images. The MAPk principle is significantly more robust than the MAPx,k one, yet, it involves a challenging marginalization over latent images. As a result, MAPk techniques are considered complicated, and have not been widely exploited. This paper derives a simple approximate MAPk algorithm which involves only a modest modification of common MAPx,k algorithms. We show that MAPk can, in fact, be optimized easily, with no additional computational complexity

The attendant code is here.


Linear Programming and Variants of Belief Propagation by Yair Weiss., Chen Yanover. and Talya Meltzer







This paper presents a nonlinear mixing model for hyperspectral image unmixing and nonlinearity detection. The proposed model assumes that the pixel reflectances are nonlinear functions of pure spectral components contaminated by an additive white Gaussian noise. These nonlinear functions are approximated using polynomial functions leading to a polynomial post-nonlinear mixing model. The parameters involved in the resulting model are estimated using least squares methods. A generalized likelihood ratio test based on the asymptotic estimator distributions is then proposed to decide if the observed pixel results from the commonly used linear mixing model or from a more general nonlinear mixture. The derivation of a lower bound associated with the unmixing problem subject to the physical constraints of the abundance vectors allows the statistical test to be computed by assuming that the estimators achieve the considered bound. The performance of the detection strategy is evaluated thanks to simulations conducted on synthetic and real data.


Finally, I found this Postdoc position at the University of Oklahoma:

Postdoctoral Research Associate - 2
Institution:  The University of Oklahoma
Location:Norman, OK
Category:
  • Faculty - Engineering - Electrical
Posted:12/08/2011
App. Due:Open Until Filled
Type:Full Time
Salary:Negotiable USD Per Year
The University of Oklahoma, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering is hiring for two positions in the area of radar engineering. These positions will provide advanced technical expertise on radar-related topics in signal processing and in RF compressive receiver analysis and design. They will assist with technical supervision of graduate students and other technical staff, if appropriate and will require periodic reporting and documentation as required by program timelines. Occasional travel may be required.
Required Skills: Demonstrated experience in information theory and/or statistical signal processing; ability for independent research with associated publication record; ability to work in a team environment; ability to communicate effectively verbally and in writing.
Desired Skills: Experience in compressive sensing; radar algorithm development for imaging, target detection and tracking; RF or spread-spectrum receiver design and implementation; radar target recognition; numerical optimization techniques; and experience with one or more high-level programming languages (C, C++, etc.).
The DARPA Knowledge Enhanced Compressive Measurement (KECoM) project has the primary goals of 1) developing a mathematical framework for incorporating prior knowledge of tasks and observed signals into the design of compressive sensors, and 2) applying this framework to relevant sensing modalities.
The University of Oklahoma School of ECE expects a new award under the KECoM program. Under this award, OU will investigate and demonstrate the optimization of compressive sensing measurement kernels for radar and communications. Measurements will be optimized using information-theoretic techniques and available prior knowledge while enforcing hardware-specific physical constraints. A postdoctoral researcher will assist with developing optimization methods, perform performance analyses, and assist with hardware demonstrations of a compressive spread-spectrum receiver and compressive radar transmitter/receiver.
Original postdoctoral appointment is for one year with possible renewal.

Friday, December 09, 2011

Compressive Sensing Literature This Week

This week we have quite a few interesting papers on top of the ones I have already mentioned. I am also having some difficulty trying to parse whether we have some compressive sensing problem or some matrix factorization one. The latter will be the subject of a different entry. Enjoy!

First a presentation by Rémi Gribonval entitled Sparsity & Co.:An Overview of Analysis vs Synthesis in Low-Dimensional Signal Models that features some actual experimental work with compressive sensing.

There is afterwards a mix of Arxiv. NIPS'11 and other papers:


We consider a system of m linear equations in n variables Ax=b where A is a given m x n matrix and b is a given m-vector known to be equal to Ax' for some unknown solution x' that is integer and k-sparse: x' in {0,1}^n and exactly k entries of x' are 1. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for recovering the solution x exactly using an LP relaxation that minimizes l1 norm of x. When A is drawn from a distribution that has exchangeable columns, we show an interesting connection between the recovery probability and a well known problem in geometry, namely the k-set problem. To the best of our knowledge, this connection appears to be new in the compressive sensing literature. We empirically show that for large n if the elements of A are drawn i.i.d. from the normal distribution then the performance of the recovery LP exhibits a phase transition, i.e., for each k there exists a value m' of m such that the recovery always succeeds if m > m' and always fails if m < m'. Using the empirical data we conjecture that m' = nH(k/n)/2 where H(x) = -(x)log_2(x) - (1-x)log_2(1-x) is the binary entropy function.
If you recall a similar limit was also attained by the EM-BG-AMP solver of  Jeremy Vila and Phil Schniter


On the error of estimating the sparsest solution of underdetermined linear systems by Massoud Babaie-Zadeh, Christian Jutten, Hosein Mohimani. The abstract reads:
Let A be an n by m matrix with m>n, and suppose that the underdetermined linear system As=x admits a sparse solution s0 for which ||s0||_0 < 1/2 spark(A). Such a sparse solution is unique due to a well-known uniqueness theorem. Suppose now that we have somehow a solution s_hat as an estimation of s0, and suppose that s_hat is only `approximately sparse', that is, many of its components are very small and nearly zero, but not mathematically equal to zero. Is such a solution necessarily close to the true sparsest solution? More generally, is it possible to construct an upper bound on the estimation error ||s_hat-s0||_2 without knowing s0? The answer is positive, and in this paper we construct such a bound based on minimal singular values of submatrices of A. We will also state a tight bound, which is more complicated, but besides being tight, enables us to study the case of random dictionaries and obtain probabilistic upper bounds. We will also study the noisy case, that is, where x=As+n. Moreover, we will see that where ||s0||_0 grows, to obtain a predetermined guaranty on the maximum of ||s_hat-s0||_2, s_hat is needed to be sparse with a better approximation. This can be seen as an explanation to the fact that the estimation quality of sparse recovery algorithms degrades where ||s0||_0 grows.

Target Detection Performance Bounds in Compressive Imaging by Kalyani Krishnamurthy, Rebecca Willett, Maxim Raginsky. The abstract reads:
This paper describes computationally efficient approaches and associated theoretical performance guarantees for the detection of known targets and anomalies from few projection measurements of the underlying signals. The proposed approaches accommodate signals of different strengths contaminated by a colored Gaussian background, and perform detection without reconstructing the underlying signals from the observations. The theoretical performance bounds of the target detector highlight fundamental tradeoffs among the number of measurements collected, amount of background signal present, signal-to-noise ratio, and similarity among potential targets coming from a known dictionary. The anomaly detector is designed to control the number of false discoveries. The proposed approach does not depend on a known sparse representation of targets; rather, the theoretical performance bounds exploit the structure of a known dictionary of targets and the distance preservation property of the measurement matrix. Simulation experiments illustrate the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed approaches.

We develop mask iterative hard thresholding algorithms (mask IHT and mask DORE) for sparse image reconstruction of objects with known contour. The measurements follow a noisy underdetermined linear model common in the compressive sampling literature. Assuming that the contour of the object that we wish to reconstruct is known and that the signal outside the contour is zero, we formulate a constrained residual squared error minimization problem that incorporates both the geometric information (i.e. the knowledge of the object's contour) and the signal sparsity constraint. We first introduce a mask IHT method that aims at solving this minimization problem and guarantees monotonically non-increasing residual squared error for a given signal sparsity level. We then propose a double overrelaxation scheme for accelerating the convergence of the mask IHT algorithm. We also apply convex mask reconstruction approaches that employ a convex relaxation of the signal sparsity constraint. In X-ray computed tomography (CT), we propose an automatic scheme for extracting the convex hull of the inspected object from the measured sinograms; the obtained convex hull is used to capture the object contour information. We compare the proposed mask reconstruction schemes with the existing large-scale sparse signal reconstruction methods via numerical simulations and demonstrate that, by exploiting both the geometric contour information of the underlying image and sparsity of its wavelet coefficients, we can reconstruct this image using a significantly smaller number of measurements than the existing methods.

While compressed sensing (CS) based reconstructions have been developed for low-dose CBCT, a clear understanding on the relationship between the image quality and imaging dose at low dose levels is needed. In this paper, we qualitatively investigate this subject in a comprehensive manner with extensive experimental and simulation studies. The basic idea is to plot image quality and imaging dose together as functions of number of projections and mAs per projection over the whole clinically relevant range. A clear understanding on the tradeoff between image quality and dose can be achieved and optimal low-dose CBCT scan protocols can be developed for various imaging tasks in IGRT. Main findings of this work include: 1) Under the CS framework, image quality has little degradation over a large dose range, and the degradation becomes evident when the dose < 100 total mAs. A dose < 40 total mAs leads to a dramatic image degradation. Optimal low-dose CBCT scan protocols likely fall in the dose range of 40-100 total mAs, depending on the specific IGRT applications. 2) Among different scan protocols at a constant low-dose level, the super sparse-view reconstruction with projection number less than 50 is the most challenging case, even with strong regularization. Better image quality can be acquired with other low mAs protocols. 3) The optimal scan protocol is the combination of a medium number of projections and a medium level of mAs/view. This is more evident when the dose is around 72.8 total mAs or below and when the ROI is a low-contrast or high-resolution object. Based on our results, the optimal number of projections is around 90 to 120. 4) The clinically acceptable lowest dose level is task dependent. In our study, 72.8mAs is a safe dose level for visualizing low-contrast objects, while 12.2 total mAs is sufficient for detecting high-contrast objects of diameter greater than 3 mm.

The sparse signal recovery in standard compressed sensing (CS) requires that the sensing matrix be known a priori. The CS problem subject to perturbation in the sensing matrix is often encountered in practice and results in the literature have shown that the signal recovery error grows linearly with the perturbation level. This paper assumes a structure for the perturbation. Under mild conditions on the perturbed sensing matrix, it is shown that a sparse signal can be recovered by $\ell_1$ minimization with the recovery error being at most proportional to the measurement noise level, similar to that in the standard CS. The recovery is exact in the special noise free case provided that the signal is sufficiently sparse with respect to the perturbation level. A similar result holds for compressible signals under an additional assumption of small perturbation. Algorithms are proposed for implementing the $\ell_1$ minimization problem and numerical simulations are carried out that verify our analysis.
I've talked to David and he tells me that he is using dictionary coming from a background of sparse recovery. In CS we generally make a difference between the measurement matrix and the dictionary. In his case, the measurement matrix is the identity. Sparse Estimation with Structured Dictionaries by David P. Wipf. The abstract reads:
In the vast majority of recent work on sparse estimation algorithms, performance has been evaluated using ideal or quasi-ideal dictionaries (e.g., random Gaussian or Fourier) characterized by unit 2 norm, incoherent columns or features. But in reality, these types of dictionaries represent only a subset of the dictionaries that are actually used in practice (largely restricted to idealized compressive sensing applications). In contrast, herein sparse estimation is considered in the context of structured dictionaries possibly exhibiting high coherence between arbitrary groups of columns and/or rows. Sparse penalized regression models are analyzed with the purpose of finding, to the extent possible, regimes of dictionary invariant performance. In particular, a Type II Bayesian estimator with a dictionarydependent sparsity penalty is shown to have a number of desirable invariance properties leading to provable advantages over more conventional penalties such as the 1 norm, especially in areas where existing theoretical recovery guarantees no longer hold. This can translate into improved performance in applications such as model selection with correlated features, source localization, and compressive sensing with constrained measurement directions.
Dimensionality Reduction Using the Sparse Linear Model by Ioannis Gkioulekas Todd Zickler. The abstract reads:
We propose an approach for linear unsupervised dimensionality reduction, based on the sparse linear model that has been used to probabilistically interpret sparse coding. We formulate an optimization problem for learning a linear projection from the original signal domain to a lower-dimensional one in a way that approximately preserves, in expectation, pairwise inner products in the sparse domain. We derive solutions to the problem, present nonlinear extensions, and discuss relations to compressed sensing. Our experiments using facial images, texture patches, and images of object categories suggest that the approach can improve our ability to recover meaningful structure in many classes of signals.
The attendant project page is here.
I like a lot what Todd Zickler is doing from providing hyperspectral datasets to arduino based cameras (Wide-angle Micro Sensors for Vision on a Tight Budget) to specular flow. I am sure I'll talk more about what he does in the future.


In this paper, we consider the problem of compressed sensing where the goal is to recover almost all sparse vectors using a small number of fixed linear measurements. For this problem, we propose a novel partial hard-thresholding operator that leads to a general family of iterative algorithms. While one extreme of the family yields well known hard thresholding algorithms like ITI and HTP[17, 10], the other end of the spectrum leads to a novel algorithm that we call Orthogonal Matching Pursuit with Replacement (OMPR). OMPR, like the classic greedy algorithm OMP, adds exactly one coordinate to the support at each iteration, based on the correlation with the current residual. However, unlike OMP, OMPR also removes one coordinate from the support. This simple change allows us to prove that OMPR has the best known guarantees for sparse recovery in terms of the Restricted Isometry Property (a condition on the measurement matrix). In contrast, OMP is known to have very weak performance guarantees under RIP. Given its simple structure, we are able to extend OMPR using locality sensitive hashing to get OMPR-Hash, the first provably sub-linear (in dimensionality) algorithm for sparse recovery. Our proof techniques are novel and flexible enough to also permit the tightest known analysis of popular iterative algorithms such as CoSaMP and Subspace Pursuit. We provide experimental results on large problems providing recovery for vectors of size up to million dimensions. We demonstrate that for large-scale problems our proposed methods are more robust and faster than existing methods.

We consider the problem of recovering the parameter R K of a sparse function f (i.e. the number of non-zero entries of is small compared to the number K of features) given noisy evaluations of f at a set of well-chosen sampling points. We introduce an additional randomization process, called Brownian sensing, based on the computation of stochastic integrals, which produces a Gaussian sensing matrix, for which good recovery properties are proven, independently on the number of sampling points N , even when the features are arbitrarily non-orthogonal. Under the assumption that f is Holder continuous with exponent at least 1 / 2 , we provide an estimate of the parameter such that - 2 = O ( 2 / N ) , where is the observation noise. The method uses a set of sampling points uniformly distributed along a one-dimensional curve selected according to the features. We report numerical experiments illustrating our method.

On the accuracy of -filtering of signals with block-sparse structure by Anatoli JuditskyFatma Kılınc KarzanArkadi NemirovskiBoris Polyak. The abstract reads:
We discuss new methods for the recovery of signals with block-sparse structure, based on 1 -minimization. Our emphasis is on the efficiently computable error bounds for the recovery routines. We optimize these bounds with respect to the method parameters to construct the estimators with improved statistical properties. We justify the proposed approach with an oracle inequality which links the properties of the recovery algorithms and the best estimation performance.

Finding optimal sparse solutions to estimation problems, particularly in underdetermined regimes has recently gained much attention. Most existing literature study linear models in which the squared error is used as the measure of discrepancy to be minimized. However, in many applications discrepancy is measured in more general forms such as loglikelihood. Regularization by `1-norm has been shown to induce sparse solutions, but their sparsity level can be merely suboptimal. In this paper we present a greedy algorithm, dubbed Gradient Support Pursuit (GraSP), for sparsity-constrained optimization. Quantifiable guarantees are provided for GraSP when cost functions have the “Stable Hessian Property”.
The attendant presentation is here.




Clinical imaging with structural MRI routinely relies on multiple acquisitions of the same region of interest under several different contrast preparations. This work presents a reconstruction algorithm based on Bayesian compressed sensing to jointly reconstruct a set of images from undersampled kspace data with higher fidelity than when the images are reconstructed either individually or jointly by a previously proposed algorithm, M-FOCUSS. The joint inference problem is formulated in a hierarchical Bayesian setting, wherein solving each of the inverse problems corresponds to finding the parameters (here, image gradient coefficients) associated with each of the images. The variance of image gradients across contrasts for a single volumetric spatial position is a single hyperparameter. All of the images from the same anatomical region, but with different contrast properties, contribute to the estimation of the hyperparameters, and once they are found, the k-space data belonging to each image are used independently to infer the image gradients. Thus, commonality of image spatial structure across contrasts is exploited without the problematic assumption of correlation across contrasts. Examples demonstrate improved reconstruction quality (up to a factor of 4 in root-mean-square error) compared with previous compressed sensing algorithms and show the benefit of joint inversion under a hierarchical Bayesian model.


Sampling and processing for compressive holography by Sehoon Lim, Daniel L. Marks, and David J. Brady. The abstract reads:
Compressive holography applies sparsity priors to data acquired by digital holography to infer a small number of object features or basis vectors from a slightly larger number of discrete measurements. Compressive holography may be applied to reconstruct three-dimensional (3D) images from two-dimensional (2D) measurements or to reconstruct 2D images from sparse apertures. This paper is a tutorial covering practical compressive holography procedures, including field propagation, reference filtering, and inverse problems in compressive holography. We present as examples 3D tomography from a 2D hologram, 2D image reconstruction from a sparse aperture, and diffuse object estimation from diverse speckle realizations.
of interest is the presentation on Experimental Demonstrations of Compressive Holography

Sharp RIP Bound for Sparse Signal and Low-Rank Matrix Recovery by Tony Cai and Anru Zhang. The abstract reads:
This paper establishes a sharp condition on the restrict isometry property (RIP) for both the sparse signal recovery and low-rank matrix recovery. It is shown that if the measurement matrix A satisfies the RIP condition δAk <1/3, then all k-sparse signals β can be recovered exactly via the constrained l1 minimization based on y = Aβ. Similarly, if the linear map M satisfies the RIP condition δMr <1/3, then all matricesX of rank at most r can be recovered exactly via the constrained nuclear norm minimization based on b = M(X). Furthermore, in both cases it is not possible to do so in general when the condition does not hold. In addition, noisy cases are considered and oracle inequalities are given under the sharp RIP condition.


of related interest:

Given a subset K of the unit Euclidean sphere, we estimate the minimal number m = m(K) of hyperplanes that generate a uniform tessellation of K, in the sense that the fraction of the hyperplanes separating any pair x; y 2 K is nearly proportional to the Euclidean distance between x and y. Random hyperplanes prove to be almost ideal for this problem; they achieve the almost optimal bound m = O(w(K)2) where w(K) is the Gaussian mean width of K. Using the map that sends x 2 K to the sign vector with respect to the hyperplanes, we conclude that every bounded subset K of Rn embeds into the Hamming cube f1; 1gm with a small distortion in
the Gromov-Haussdor metric. Since for many sets K one has m = m(K) n, this yields a new discrete mechanism of dimension reduction for sets in Euclidean spaces.

Diffuse Imaging: Creating Optical Images With Unfocused Time-Resolved Illumination and Sensing by Ahmed Kirmani, Haris Jeelani, Vahid Montazerhodjat, and Vivek K Goyal, . The abstract reads:
Conventional imaging uses steady-state illumination and light sensing with focusing optics; variations of the light field with time are not exploited. We develop a signal processing framework for estimating the reflectance of a Lambertian planar surface in a known position using omnidirectional, time-varying illumination and unfocused, time-resolved sensing in place of traditional optical elements such as lenses and mirrors. Our model associates time sampling of the intensity of light incident at each sensor with a linear functional of . The discrete-time samples are processed to obtain -regularized estimates of . Improving on previous work, using nonimpulsive, bandlimited light sources instead of impulsive illumination significantly improves signal-tonoise ratio (SNR) and reconstruction quality. Our simulations suggest that practical diffuse imaging applications may be realized with commercially-available temporal light intensity modulators and sensors used in standard optical communication systems.


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