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.
Let be the support of a vector . If the columns indexed by were linearly dependent, there would be a nonzero supported in with . For sufficiently small real , the nonzero signs of remain fixed, so
Both positive and negative preserve the residual and hence feasibility, even with noise. A nonzero slope contradicts minimality in one direction. A zero slope gives distinct minimizers, contradicting uniqueness. Thus those columns are linearly independent, and
This proves the sparse vector assertion without assuming a noiseless residual.
The restricted isometry property controls uniformly over sparse vectors. It supplies quantitative near-orthogonality of disjoint sparse coordinate combinations, not merely normalization of individual columns.