Compressed sensing 2026-10-05
Compressed sensing reconstructs a sparse vector, or an approximately sparse one, from fewer linear measurements than its ambient dimension. Basis pursuit replaces counting nonzero coordinates by convex minimization. A null space property characterizes exact uniform recovery, while a robust null space property controls errors from noise and nonsparse tails.
The printed bound is false, even for and zero noise. Let and choose with six orthonormal rows spanning , so . For a vector supported on at most entries,
Take , , and . Every feasible vector is , whose objective is . Its unique minimizer is . Yet
No choice of the noise constant repairs this example. Also must be excluded: has , but its two unit-coordinate vectors have identical measurements and both minimize basis pursuit.
The corrected conclusion, for , is
with both constants depending on the restricted isometry constant. The order- threshold itself is valid for ; it need not be replaced by an order- threshold. A precise sharp robust recovery theorem gives, for , the admissible constants
This is the standard stable recovery result, invoked here explicitly; its order restriction and constants are given in arxiv.org/pdf/1302.1236, Theorem 3.3.
For completeness, the mechanism behind a robust null space property proof is as follows. Put , let index the largest entries of , and write . Feasibility and minimality give the tube and cone inequalities
If has the robust null space property with and , namely for every , then
Apply that property again to the largest entries of . Sorted coefficients satisfy , because each tail entry is at most . Therefore
This proves the usual two-constant conclusion under the explicitly stated robust null space property and explains why a fixed coefficient one is not supplied by that argument. The sharp order- theorem above supplies the conclusion for the actual printed threshold, after the necessary corrections.