A unified view of the area of sparse signal processing is presented in tutorial form by bringing together various fields in which the property of sparsity has been successfully exploited. For each of these fields, various algorithms and techniques, which have been developed to leverage sparsity, are described succinctly. The common potential benefits of significant reduction in sampling rate and processing manipulations through sparse signal processing are revealed.The key application domains of sparse signal processing are sampling, coding, spectral estimation, array processing, component analysis, and multipath channel estimation. In terms of the sampling process and reconstruction algorithms, linkages are made with random sampling, compressed sensing and rate of innovation. The redundancy introduced by channel coding in finite and real Galois fields is then related to over-sampling with similar reconstruction algorithms. The methods of Prony, Pisarenko, and MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC) are next shown to be targeted at analyzing signals with sparse frequency domain representations. Specifically, the relations of the approach of Prony to an annihilating filter in rate of innovation and Error Locator Polynomials in coding are emphasized; the Pisarenko and MUSIC methods are further improvements of the Prony method. Such narrowband spectral estimation is then related to multi-source location and direction of arrival estimation in array processing. The notions of sparse array beamforming and sparse sensor networks are also introduced. Sparsity in unobservable source signals is also shown to facilitate source separation in Sparse Component Analysis (SCA); the algorithms developed in this area are also widely used in compressed sensing. Finally, the nature of the multipath channel estimation problem is shown to have a sparse formulation; algorithms similar to sampling and coding are used to estimate typical multicarrier communication channels.
I. INTRODUCTIONT HERE are many applications in signal processing and communication systems where the discrete signals are sparse in some domain such as time, frequency, or space i.e., most of the samples are zero, or alternatively their transform in another domain (normally called "frequency coefficients")