Fundamental Limits of Blind Deconvolution Part I: Ambiguity Kernel

Blind deconvolution is an ubiquitous non-linear inverse problem in applications like wireless communications and image processing. This problem is generally ill-posed, and there have been efforts to use sparse models for regularizing blind deconvolution to promote signal identifiability. Part I of this two-part paper characterizes the ambiguity space of blind deconvolution and shows unidentifiability of this inverse problem for almost every pair of unconstrained input signals. The approach involves lifting the deconvolution problem to a rank one matrix recovery problem and analyzing the rank two null space of the resultant linear operator. A measure theoretically tight (parametric and recursive) representation of the key rank two null space is stated and proved. This representation is a novel foundational result for signal and code design strategies promoting identifiability under convolutive observation models. Part II of this paper analyzes the identifiability of sparsity constrained blind deconvolution and establishes surprisingly strong negative results on scaling laws for the sparsity-ambiguity trade-off.