Convex fused lasso denoising with non-convex regularization and its use for pulse detection

We propose a convex formulation of the fused lasso signal approximation problem consisting of non-convex penalty functions. The fused lasso signal model aims to estimate a sparse piecewise constant signal from a noisy observation. Originally, the ℓ1 norm was used as a sparsity-inducing convex penalty function for the fused lasso signal approximation problem. However, the ℓ1 norm underestimates signal values. Non-convex sparsity-inducing penalty functions better estimate signal values. In this paper, we show how to ensure the convexity of the fused lasso signal approximation problem with non-convex penalty functions. We further derive a computationally efficient algorithm using the majorization-minimization technique. We apply the proposed fused lasso method for the detection of pulses.