An unrolled half-quadratic approach for sparse signal recovery in spectroscopy

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of sparse signal reconstruction frequently arising in analytical chemistry. Spectroscopic restoration is an important task that was tackled using two distinct approaches. First, model-based iterative methods were deployed. These methods rely on a strong theoretical background. However they face practical obstacles in terms of hyperparameter tuning. Conversely, approaches based on deep neural networks are fast and easy to implement. Nonetheless, they are often described as black-box tools, and their stability/robustness are ongoing research topics. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network based on unrolling a Majorization-Minimization (MM) Half-Quadratic (HQ) algorithm. This allows us to build interpretable layers mirroring iterations, making it possible to learn automatically data-driven hyperparameters such as regularization and stepsizes. Furthermore, we propose a dictionary of custom activation functions derived from potentials used in the original variational model. This interpretation of activations can be useful for analyzing the stability of neural networks. The efficiency of our method in comparison to iterative and learning-based methods is showcased through various experiments conducted on realistic mass spectrometry (MS) databases with various blur kernels and noise levels. All experiments show an improved reconstruction quality of chemical signals, while maintaining a low execution time at the test phase. All the results are reproducible, through the code shared on a repository available at https://github.com/GHARBIMouna/Unrolled-Half-Quadratic.