Power allocation in compressed sensing of non-uniformly sparse signals

This paper studies the problem of power allocation in compressed sensing when different components in the unknown sparse signal have different probability to be non-zero. Given the prior information of the non-uniform sparsity and the total power budget, we are interested in how to optimally allocate the power across the columns of a Gaussian random measurement matrix so that the mean squared reconstruction error is minimized. Based on the state evolution technique originated from the work by Donoho, Maleki, and Montanari, we revise the so called approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm for the reconstruction and quantify the MSE performance in the asymptotic regime. Then the closed form of the optimal power allocation is obtained. The results show that in the presence of measurement noise, uniform power allocation, which results in the commonly used Gaussian random matrix with i.i.d. entries, is not optimal for non-uniformly sparse signals. Empirical results are presented to demonstrate the performance gain.