Guarantees of total variation minimization for signal recovery

Abstract

In this paper, we consider using total variation minimization to recover signals whose gradients have a sparse support, from a small number of measurements. We establish the proof for the performance guarantee of total variation (TV) minimization in recovering \emph{one-dimensional} signal with sparse gradient support. This partially answers the open problem of proving the fidelity of total variation minimization in such a setting \cite{TVMulti}. In particular, we have shown that the recoverable gradient sparsity can grow linearly with the signal dimension when TV minimization is used. Recoverable sparsity thresholds of TV minimization are explicitly computed for 1-dimensional signal by using the Grassmann angle framework. We also extend our results to TV minimization for multidimensional signals. Stability of recovering signal itself using 1-D TV minimization has also been established through a property called "almost Euclidean property for 1-dimensional TV norm". We further give a lower bound on the number of random Gaussian measurements for recovering 1-dimensional signal vectors with $N$ elements and $K$-sparse gradients. Interestingly, the number of needed measurements is lower bounded by $\Omega((NK)^{\frac{1}{2}})$, rather than the $O(K\log(N/K))$ bound frequently appearing in recovering $K$-sparse signal vectors.