Information optimal compressive sensing: static measurement design.

The compressive sensing paradigm exploits the inherent sparsity/compressibility of signals to reduce the number of measurements required for reliable reconstruction/recovery. In many applications additional prior information beyond signal sparsity, such as structure in sparsity, is available, and current efforts are mainly limited to exploiting that information exclusively in the signal reconstruction problem. In this work, we describe an information-theoretic framework that incorporates the additional prior information as well as appropriate measurement constraints in the design of compressive measurements. Using a Gaussian binomial mixture prior we design and analyze the performance of optimized projections relative to random projections under two specific design constraints and different operating measurement signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes. We find that the information-optimized designs yield significant, in some cases nearly an order of magnitude, improvements in the reconstruction performance with respect to the random projections. These improvements are especially notable in the low measurement SNR regime where the energy-efficient design of optimized projections is most advantageous. In such cases, the optimized projection design departs significantly from random projections in terms of their incoherence with the representation basis. In fact, we find that the maximizing incoherence of projections with the representation basis is not necessarily optimal in the presence of additional prior information and finite measurement noise/error. We also apply the information-optimized projections to the compressive image formation problem for natural scenes, and the improved visual quality of reconstructed images with respect to random projections and other compressive measurement design affirms the overall effectiveness of the information-theoretic design framework.