Examples of basis pursuit

The Time-Frequency and Time-Scale communities have recently developed a large number of overcomplete waveform dictionaries. Decomposition into overcomplete systems is not unique, and several methods for decomposition have been proposed--including the Method of Frames, Matching Pursuit, and, for special dictionaries, the Best Orthogonal Basis. Basis Pursuit is a principle for decomposing a signal into an `optimal' superposition of dictionary elements-- where optimal means having the smallest l1 norm of coefficients among all such decompositions. We give examples exhibiting several advantages over the Method of Frames, Matching Pursuit and Best Ortho Basis, including better sparsity, and super-resolution. Basis Pursuit in highly overcomplete dictionaries leads to large-scale optimization problems. We obtain reasonable success with a primal-dual logarithmic barrier method and conjugate gradient solver.