Sampling the Flow of a Bandlimited Function

Abstract

We analyze the problem of reconstruction of a bandlimited function f from the space–time samples of its states f_t=phi _t*f resulting from the convolution with a kernel phi _t. It is well-known that, in natural phenomena, uniform space–time samples of f are not sufficient to reconstruct f in a stable way. To enable stable reconstruction, a space–time sampling with periodic nonuniformly spaced samples must be used as was shown by Lu and Vetterli. We show that the stability of reconstruction, as measured by a condition number, controls the maximal gap between the spacial samples. We provide a quantitative statement of this result. In addition, instead of irregular space–time samples, we show that uniform dynamical samples at sub-Nyquist spatial rate allow one to stably reconstruct the function widehat{f} away from certain, explicitly described blind spots. We also consider several classes of finite dimensional subsets of bandlimited functions in which the stable reconstruction is possible, even inside the blind spots. We obtain quantitative estimates for it using Remez-Turán type inequalities. En route, we obtain Remez-Turán inequality for prolate spheroidal wave functions. To illustrate our results, we present some numerics and explicit estimates for the heat flow problem.