Sensitivity to basis mismatch in compressed sensing

Compressed sensing theory suggests that successful inversion of an image of the physical world from its modal parameters can be achieved at measurement dimensions far lower than the image dimension, provided that the image is sparse in an a priori known basis. The assumed basis for sparsity typically corresponds to a gridding of the parameter space, e.g., an DFT grid in spectrum analysis. However, in reality no physical field is sparse in the DFT basis or in an a priori known basis. No matter how finely we grid the parameter space the sources may not lie in the center of the grid cells and there is always mismatch between the assumed and the actual bases for sparsity. In this paper, we study the sensitivity of compressed sensing (basis pursuit to be exact) to mismatch between the assumed and the actual sparsity bases. Our mathematical analysis and numerical examples show that the performance of basis pursuit degrades considerably in the presence of basis mismatch.