Compressive covariance sampling

Most research efforts in the field of compressed sensing have been pointed towards analyzing sampling and reconstruction techniques for sparse signals, where sampling rates below the Nyquist rate can be reached. When only second-order statistics or, equivalently, covariance information is of interest, perfect signal reconstruction is not required and rate reductions can be achieved even for non-sparse signals. This is what we will refer to as compressive covariance sampling. In this paper, we will study minimum-rate compressive covariance sampling designs within the class of non-uniform samplers. Necessary and sufficient conditions for perfect covariance reconstruction will be provided and connections to the well-known sparse ruler problem will be highlighted.