Proximal Thresholding Algorithm for Minimization over Orthonormal Bases

The notion of soft thresholding plays a central role in problems from various areas of applied mathematics, in which the ideal solution is known to possess a sparse decomposition in some orthonormal basis. Using convex-analytical tools, we extend this notion to that of proximal thresholding and investigate its properties, providing in particular several characterizations of such thresholders. We then propose a versatile convex variational formulation for optimization over orthonormal bases that covers a wide range of problems, and establish the strong convergence of a proximal thresholding algorithm to solve it. Numerical applications to signal recovery are demonstrated. 1 Problem formulation Throughout this paper, H is a separable infinite-dimensional real Hilbert space with scalar product 〈· | ·〉, norm ‖·‖, and distance d. Moreover, Γ0(H) denotes the class of proper lower semicontinuous convex functions from H to ]−∞,+∞], and (ek)k∈N is an orthonormal basis of H. The standard denoising problem in signal theory consists of recovering the original form of a signal x ∈ H from an observation z = x + v, where v ∈ H is the realization of a noise process. In many instances, x is known to admit a sparse representation with respect to (ek)k∈N and an estimate x of x can be constructed by removing the coefficients of smallest magnitude in the