Radio interferometry probes astrophysical signals through incomplete and noisy Fourier measurements. The theory of compressed sensing demonstrates that such measurements may actually suffice for accurate reconstruction of sparse or compressible signals. We propose new generic imaging techniques based on convex optimization for global minimization problems defined in this context. The versatility of the framework notably allows introduction of specific prior information on the signals, which offers the possibility of significant improvements of reconstruction relative to the standard local matching pursuit algorithm CLEAN used in radio astronomy. We illustrate the potential of the approach by studying reconstruction performances on simulations of two different kinds of signals observed with very generic interferometric configurations. The first kind is an intensity field of compact astrophysical objects. The second kind is the imprint of cosmic strings in the temperature field of the cosmic microwave background radiation, of particular interest for cosmology.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure. Version 2 matches version accepted for publication in MNRAS. Changes includes: writing corrections, clarifications of arguments, figure update, and a new subsection 4.1 commenting on the exact compliance of radio interferometric measurements with compressed sensin

International audienceWe study the problem of sampling k-bandlimited signals on graphs. We propose two sampling strategies that consist in selecting a small subset of nodes at random. The first strategy is non-adaptive, i.e., independent of the graph structure, and its performance depends on a parameter called the graph coherence. On the contrary, the second strategy is adaptive but yields optimal results. Indeed, no more than O(k log(k)) measurements are sufficient to ensure an accurate and stable recovery of all k-bandlimited signals. This second strategy is based on a careful choice of the sampling distribution, which can be estimated quickly. Then, we propose a computationally efficient decoder to reconstruct k-bandlimited signals from their samples. We prove that it yields accurate reconstructions and that it is also stable to noise. Finally, we conduct several experiments to test these techniques. [Code available at http://grsamplingbox.gforge.inria.fr/

Abstract. Inspired by the recently proposed Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF) technique, we develop a principled compressed sensing framework for quantitative MRI. The three key components are: a random pulse excitation sequence following the MRF technique; a random EPI subsampling strategy and an iterative projection algorithm that imposes consistency with the Bloch equations. We show that theoretically, as long as the excitation sequence possesses an appropriate form of persistent excitation, we are able to accurately recover the proton density, T1, T2 and off-resonance maps simultaneously from a limited number of samples. These results are further supported through extensive simulations using a brain phantom.Key words. Compressed sensing, MRI, Bloch equations, manifolds, Johnston-Linderstrauss embedding 1. Introduction. Inspired by the recently proposed procedure of Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF), which gives a new technique for quantitative MRI, we investigate this idea from a compressed sensing perspective. While MRF itself, was inspired by the recent growth of compressed sensing (CS) techniques in MRI [29], the exact link to CS was not made explicit, and the paper does not consider a full CS formulation. Indeed the role of sparsity, random excitation and sampling are not clarified. The goal of this current paper is to make the links with CS explicit, shed light on the appropriate acquisition and reconstruction procedures and hence to develop a full compressed sensing strategy for quantitative MRI.In particular, we identify separate roles for the pulse excitation and the subsampling of k-space. We identify the Bloch response manifold as the appropriate low dimensional signal model on which the CS acquisition is performed, and interpret the "model-based" dictionary of [29] as a natural discretization of this response manifold We also discuss what is necessary in order to have an appropriate CS-type acquisition scheme.Having identified the underlying signal model we next turn to the reconstruction process. In [29] this was performed through pattern matching using a matched filter based on the model-based dictionary. However, this does not offer the opportunity for exact reconstruction, even if the signal is hypothesised to be 1-sparse in this dictionary due to the undersampling of k-space. This suggests that we should look to a model based CS framework that directly supports such manifold models [4]. Recent algorithmic work in this direction has been presented by Iwen and Maggioni [23], however, their approach is not practical in the present context as the computational cost of their scheme grows exponentially with the dimension of the manifold. Instead, we leverage recent results from [11] and develop a recovery algorithm based on the Projected Landweber Algorithm (PLA). This method also has the appealing interpretation of an iterated refinement of the original MRF scheme.The remainder of the paper is set out as follows. We begin by giving a brief overview of MRI acquisition. Then we discuss ...

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We consider the probe of astrophysical signals through radio interferometers with small field of view and baselines with non-negligible and constant component in the pointing direction. In this context, the visibilities measured essentially identify with a noisy and incomplete Fourier coverage of the product of the planar signals with a linear chirp modulation. In light of the recent theory of compressed sensing and in the perspective of defining the best possible imaging techniques for sparse signals, we analyze the related spread spectrum phenomenon and suggest its universality relative to the sparsity dictionary. Our results rely both on theoretical considerations related to the mutual coherence between the sparsity and sensing dictionaries, as well as on numerical simulations.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures. Version 2 matches version accepted for publication in MNRAS. Changes include minor clarification

Mining useful clusters from high dimensional data has received significant attention of the computer vision and pattern recognition community in the recent years. Linear and non-linear dimensionality reduction has played an important role to overcome the curse of dimensionality. However, often such methods are accompanied with three different problems: high computational complexity (usually associated with the nuclear norm minimization), non-convexity (for matrix factorization methods) and susceptibility to gross corruptions in the data. In this paper we propose a principal component analysis (PCA) based solution that overcomes these three issues and approximates a low-rank recovery method for high dimensional datasets. We target the low-rank recovery by enforcing two types of graph smoothness assumptions, one on the data samples and the other on the features by designing a convex optimization problem. The resulting algorithm is fast, efficient and scalable for huge datasets with O(nlog(n)) computational complexity in the number of data samples. It is also robust to gross corruptions in the dataset as well as to the model parameters. Clustering experiments on 7 benchmark datasets with different types of corruptions and background separation experiments on 3 video datasets show that our proposed model outperforms 10 state-of-the-art dimensionality reduction models. Our theoretical analysis proves that the proposed model is able to recover approximate low-rank representations with a bounded error for clusterable data

Abstract-Incoherence between sparsity basis and sensing basis is an essential concept for compressive sampling. In this context, we advocate a coherence-driven optimization procedure for variable density sampling. The associated minimization problem is solved by use of convex optimization algorithms. We also propose a refinement of our technique when prior information is available on the signal support in the sparsity basis. The effectiveness of the method is confirmed by numerical experiments. Our results also provide a theoretical underpinning to state-of-the-art variable density Fourier sampling procedures used in MRI.

Abstract-We investigate a compressive sensing framework in which the sensors introduce a distortion to the measurements in the form of unknown gains. We focus on blind calibration, using measures performed on multiple unknown (but sparse) signals and formulate the joint recovery of the gains and the sparse signals as a convex optimization problem. We divide this problem in 3 subproblems with different conditions on the gains, specifially (i) gains with different amplitude and the same phase, (ii) gains with the same amplitude and different phase and (iii) gains with different amplitude and phase. In order to solve the first case, we propose an extension to the basis pursuit optimization which can estimate the unknown gains along with the unknown sparse signals. For the second case, we formulate a quadratic approach that eliminates the unknown phase shifts and retrieves the unknown sparse signals. An alternative form of this approach is also formulated to reduce complexity and memory requirements and provide scalability with respect to the number of input signals. Finally for the third case, we propose a formulation that combines the earlier two approaches to solve the problem. The performance of the proposed algorithms is investigated extensively through numerical simulations, which demonstrates that simultaneous signal recovery and calibration is possible with convex methods when sufficiently many (unknown, but sparse) calibrating signals are provided.