How to find real-world applications for compressive sensing

TL;DR

This paper discusses how to identify practical applications for compressive sensing, demonstrating its benefits in sea skimming missile detection with a simplified architecture that matches conventional methods using fewer resources.

Contribution

It provides a framework for finding real-world applications of CS and presents a proof of concept in missile detection showing comparable performance with less hardware.

Findings

CS can be effectively applied to missile detection.

A simplified CS architecture achieves similar results to conventional imaging.

Critical evaluation of CS applications is essential for practical adoption.

Abstract

The potential of compressive sensing (CS) has spurred great interest in the research community and is a fast growing area of research. However, research translating CS theory into practical hardware and demonstrating clear and significant benefits with this hardware over current, conventional imaging techniques has been limited. This article helps researchers to find those niche applications where the CS approach provides substantial gain over conventional approaches by articulating lessons learned in finding one such application; sea skimming missile detection. As a proof of concept, it is demonstrated that a simplified CS missile detection architecture and algorithm provides comparable results to the conventional imaging approach but using a smaller FPA. The primary message is that all of the excitement surrounding CS is necessary and appropriate for encouraging our creativity but we all must also take off our "rose colored glasses" and critically judge our ideas, methods and results relative to conventional imaging approaches.