Graded quantization: Democracy for multiple descriptions in compressed sensing

The compressed sensing paradigm allows to efficiently represent sparse signals by means of their linear measurements. However, the problem of transmitting these measurements to a receiver over a channel potentially prone to packet losses has received little attention so far. In this paper, we propose novel methods to generate multiple descriptions from compressed sensing measurements to increase the robustness over unreliable channels. In particular, we exploit the democracy property of compressive measurements to generate descriptions in a simple manner by partitioning the measurement vector and properly allocating bit-rate, outperforming classical methods like the multiple description scalar quantizer. In addition, we propose a modified version of the Basis Pursuit Denoising recovery procedure that is specifically tailored to the proposed methods. Experimental results show significant performance gains with respect to existing methods.