Sensitivity to Basis Mismatch in Compressed Sensing

The theory of compressed sensing suggests that successful inversion of an image of the physical world (broadly defined to include speech signals, radar/sonar returns, vibration records, sensor array snapshot vectors, 2-D images, and so on) for its source modes and amplitudes can be achieved at measurement dimensions far lower than what might be expected from the classical theories of spectrum or modal analysis, provided that the image is sparse in an apriori known basis. For imaging problems in spectrum analysis, and passive and active radar/sonar, this basis is usually taken to be a DFT basis. However, in reality no physical field is sparse in the DFT basis or in any apriori known basis. No matter how finely…