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The recently introduced compressive sensing (CS) framework enables digital signal acquisition systems to take advantage of signal structures beyond bandlimitedness. Indeed, the number of CS measurements required for stable reconstruction is closer to the order of the signal complexity than the Nyquist rate. To date, the CS theory has focused on real-valued measurements, but in practice, measurements are mapped to bits from a finite alphabet. Moreover, in many potential applications the total number of measurement bits is constrained, which suggests a tradeoff between the number of measurements and the number of bits per measurement. We study this situation in this paper and show that there exist two distinct regimes of operation that correspond to high/low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In the measurement compression (MC) regime, a high SNR favors acquiring fewer measurements with more bits per measurement; in the quantization compression (QC) regime, a low SNR favors acquiring more measurements with fewer bits per measurement. A surprise from our analysis and experiments is that in many practical applications it is better to operate in the QC regime, even acquiring as few as 1 bit per measurement.

Compressive sensing (CS) exploits the sparsity present in many signals to reduce the number of measurements needed for digital acquisition. With this reduction would come, in theory, commensurate reductions in the size, weight, power consumption, and/or monetary cost of both signal sensors and any associated communication links. This paper examines the use of CS in the design of a wideband radio receiver in a noisy environment. We formulate the problem statement for such a receiver and establish a reasonable set of requirements that a receiver should meet to be practically useful. We then evaluate the performance of a CS-based receiver in two ways: via a theoretical analysis of its expected performance, with a particular emphasis on noise and dynamic range, and via simulations that compare the CS receiver against the performance expected from a conventional implementation. On the one hand, we show that CS-based systems that aim to reduce the number of acquired measurements are somewhat sensitive to signal noise, exhibiting a 3dB SNR loss per octave of subsampling, which parallels the classic noise-folding phenomenon. On the other hand, we demonstrate that since they sample at a lower rate, CS-based systems can potentially attain a significantly larger dynamic range. Hence, we conclude that while a CS-based system has inherent limitations that do impose some restrictions on its potential applications, it also has attributes that make it highly desirable in a number of important practical settings.

The Compressive Sensing (CS) framework aims to ease the burden on analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) by reducing the sampling rate required to acquire and stably recover sparse signals. Practical ADCs not only sample but also quantize each measurement to a finite number of bits; moreover, there is an inverse relationship between the achievable sampling rate and the bit depth. In this paper, we investigate an alternative CS approach that shifts the emphasis from the sampling rate to the number of bits per measurement. In particular, we explore the extreme case of 1-bit CS measurements, which capture just their sign. Our results come in two flavors. First, we consider ideal reconstruction from noiseless 1-bit measurements and provide a lower bound on the best achievable reconstruction error. We also demonstrate that i.i.d. random Gaussian matrices describe measurement mappings achieving, with overwhelming probability, nearly optimal error decay. Next, we consider reconstruction robustness to measurement errors and noise and introduce the Binary $\epsilon$-Stable Embedding (B$\epsilon$SE) property, which characterizes the robustness measurement process to sign changes. We show the same class of matrices that provide almost optimal noiseless performance also enable such a robust mapping. On the practical side, we introduce the Binary Iterative Hard Thresholding (BIHT) algorithm for signal reconstruction from 1-bit measurements that offers state-of-the-art performance., Comment: 40 pages, 17 figures. This last minor revision corrects a few typos in Appendix G

The recently introduced theory of compressive sensing (CS) enables the reconstruction of sparse or compressible signals from a small set of nonadaptive, linear measurements. If properly chosen, the number of measurements can be significantly smaller than the ambient dimension of the signal and yet preserve the significant signal information. Interestingly, it can be shown that random measurement schemes provide a near-optimal encoding in terms of the required number of measurements. In this report, we explore another relatively unexplored, though often alluded to, advantage of using random matrices to acquire CS measurements. Specifically, we show that random matrices are democractic, meaning that each measurement carries roughly the same amount of signal information. We demonstrate that by slightly increasing the number of measurements, the system is robust to the loss of a small number of arbitrary measurements. In addition, we draw connections to oversampling and demonstrate stability from the loss of significantly more measurements.

Wideband analog signals push contemporary analog-to-digital conversion systems to their performance limits. In many applications, however, sampling at the Nyquist rate is inefficient because the signals of interest contain only a small number of significant frequencies relative to the bandlimit, although the locations of the frequencies may not be known a priori. For this type of sparse signal, other sampling strategies are possible. This paper describes a new type of data acquisition system, called a random demodulator, that is constructed from robust, readily available components. Let K denote the total number of frequencies in the signal, and let W denote its bandlimit in Hz. Simulations suggest that the random demodulator requires just O(K log(W/K)) samples per second to stably reconstruct the signal. This sampling rate is exponentially lower than the Nyquist rate of W Hz. In contrast with Nyquist sampling, one must use nonlinear methods, such as convex programming, to recover the signal from the samples taken by the random demodulator. This paper provides a detailed theoretical analysis of the system's performance that supports the empirical observations., Comment: 24 pages, 8 figures