Compressive Sensing Using Symmetric Alpha-Stable Distributions for Robust Sparse Signal Reconstruction

Traditional compressive sensing (CS) primarily assumes light-tailed models for the underlying signal and/or noise statistics. Nevertheless, this assumption is not met in the case of highly impulsive environments, where non-Gaussian infinite-variance processes arise for the signal and/or noise components. This drives the traditional sparse reconstruction methods to failure, since they are incapable of suppressing the effects of heavy-tailed sampling noise. The family of symmetric alpha-stable (SαS) distributions, as a powerful tool for modeling heavy-tailed behaviors, is adopted in this paper to design a robust algorithm for sparse signal reconstruction from linear random measurements corrupted by infinite-variance additive noise. Specifically, a novel greedy reconstruction method is developed, which achieves increased robustness to impulsive sampling noise by solving a minimum dispersion (MD) optimization problem based on fractional lower-order moments. The MD criterion emerges naturally in the case of additive sampling noise modeled by SαS distributions, as an effective measure of the spread of reconstruction errors around zero, due to the lack of second-order moments. The experimental evaluation demonstrates the improved reconstruction performance of the proposed algorithm when compared against state-of-the-art CS techniques for a broad range of impulsive environments.