Seminar Details
2016-04-06 (14:00) : Fast reconstruction of a compressively sampled data stream
At Euler building (A002)
Organized by Mathematical Engineering
Speaker :
Pantelis Sopasakis (IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca)
Abstract :
A very wide spectrum of optimization problems can be efficiently solved with proximal gradient methods which hinge on the celebrated forward-backward splitting (FBS) schema. But such first-order methods are only effective when low or medium accuracy is required and are known to be rather slow or even impractical for badly conditioned problems. Moreover, the straightforward introduction of second-order (Hessian) information is beset with shortcomings as, typically, at every iteration we need to solve a non-separable optimisation problem.
In this talk we will follow a different route to the solution of such optimisation problems. We will recast non-smooth optimisation problems as the minimisation of a real-valued, continuously differentiable function known as the forward-backward envelope. We will then employ a semismooth Newton method to solve the equivalent optimisation problem instead of the original one. We will then apply the proposed semismooth Newton method to L1-regularised least squares (LASSO) problems which is motivated by an an interesting application: recursive compressed sensing.
Compressed sensing is a signal processing methodology for the reconstruction of sparsely sampled signals and it offers a new paradigm for sampling signals based on their innovation, that is, the minimum number of coefficients sufficient to accurately represent it in an appropriately selected basis. Compressed sensing leads to a lower sampling rate compared to theories using some fixed basis and has many applications in image processing, medical imaging and MRI, photography, holography, facial recognition, radio astronomy, radar technology and more. The traditional compressed sensing approach is naturally offline, in that it amounts to sparsely sampling and reconstructing a given dataset. Recently, an online algorithm for performing compressed sensing on streaming data was proposed; the scheme uses recursive sampling of the input stream and recursive decompression to accurately estimate stream entries from the acquired noisy measurements.
We will see how we can tailor the forward-backward Newton method to solve recursive compressed sensing problems at one tenth of the time required by other algorithms such as ISTA, FISTA, ADMM and interior-point methods (L1LS).