Inflating compressed samples: A joint source-channel coding approach for noise-resistant compressed sensing

Recently, a lot of research has been done on compressed sensing, capturing compressible signals using random linear projections to a space of radically lower dimension than the ambient dimension of the signal. The main impetus of this is that the radically dimension-lowering linear projection step can be done totally in analog hardware, in some cases even in constant time, to avoid the bottleneck in sensing and quantization steps where a large number of samples need to be sensed and quantized in short order, mandating the use of a large number of fast expensive sensors and A/D converters. Reconstruction algorithms from these projections have been found that come within distortion levels comparable to the state of the art in lossy compression algorithms. This paper considers a variation on compressed sensing that makes it resistant to spiky noise. This is achieved by an analog real-field error-correction coding step. It results in a small asymptotic overhead in the number of samples, but makes exact reconstruction under spiky measurement noise, one type of which is the salt and pepper noise in imaging devices, possible. Simulations are performed that corroborate our claim and in fact substantially improve reconstruction under unreliable sensing characteristics and are stable even under small perturbations with Gaussian noise.