Recovery of frequency-sparse signals from compressive measurements

Compressive sensing (CS) is a new approach to simultaneous sensing and compression for sparse and compressible signals. While the discrete Fourier transform has been widely used for CS of frequency-sparse signals, it provides optimal sparse representations only for signals with components at integral frequencies. There exist redundant frames that provide compressible representations for frequency-sparse signals, but such frames are highly coherent and severely affect the performance of standard CS recovery. In this paper, we show that by modifying standard CS recovery algorithms to prevent coherent frame elements from being present in the signal estimate, it is possible to bypass the shortcomings introduced by the coherent frame. The resulting algorithm comes with theoretical guarantees and is shown to perform significantly better for frequency-sparse signal recovery than its standard counterparts. The algorithm can also be extended to similar settings that use coherent frames.