The Sensitivity to Basis Mismatch of Compressed Sensing for Spectrum Analysis and Beamforming

The theory of compressed sensing suggests that successful inversion of an image of the physical world (e.g., a radar/sonar return or a sensor array snapshot vector) for the source modes and amplitudes can be achieved at measurement dimensions far lower than what might be expected from the classical theories of spectrum or modal analysis, provided that the image is sparse in an apriori known basis. For imaging problems in passive and active radar and sonar, this basis is usually taken to be a DFT basis. The compressed sensing measurements are then inverted using an `1-minimization principle (basis pursuit) for the nonzero source amplitudes. This seems to make compressed sensing an ideal image inversion principle for high resolution modal analysis. However, in reality no physical field is sparse in the DFT basis or in an apriori known basis. In fact the main goal in image inversion is to identify the modal structure. 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 basis pursuit to mismatch between the assumed and the actual sparsity bases and compare the performance of basis pursuit with that of classical image inversion. Our mathematical analysis and numerical examples show that the performance of basis pursuit degrades considerably in the presence of mismatch, and they suggest that the use of compressed sensing as a modal analysis principle requires more consideration and refinement, at least for the problem sizes common to radar/sonar.