On a Sparse Approximation of Compressible Signals

Many physical phenomena can be modeled by compressible signals, i.e., the signals with rapidly declining sample amplitudes. Although all the samples are usually nonzero, due to practical reasons such signals are attempted to be approximated as sparse ones. Because sparsity of compressible signals cannot be unambiguously determined, a decision about a particular sparse representation is often a result of comparison between a residual error energy of a reconstruction algorithm and some quality measure. The paper explores a relation between mean square error (MSE) of the recovered signal and the residual error. A novel, practical solution that controls the sparse approximation quality using a target MSE value is the result of these considerations. The solution was tested in numerical experiments using orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm as the signal reconstruction procedure. The obtained results show that the proposed quality metric provides fine control over the approximation process of the compressible signals in the mean sense even though it has not been directly designed for use in compressed sensing methods such as OMP.