MUSIC for Single-Snapshot Spectral Estimation: Stability and Super-resolution

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the stability and super-resolution capabilities of the MUSIC algorithm for single-snapshot spectral estimation, demonstrating its effectiveness in resolving closely spaced frequencies with theoretical guarantees and numerical comparisons.

Contribution

It provides a rigorous stability analysis of MUSIC using discrete Ingham inequalities and compares its performance with other algorithms in super-resolution scenarios.

Findings

MUSIC guarantees exact reconstruction with enough measurements in noise-free cases.

Under frequency separation of at least twice the Rayleigh Length, stability is established.

MUSIC outperforms other methods at very close frequency separations, approaching zero resolution length as noise diminishes.

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of line spectral estimation in the continuum of a bounded interval with one snapshot of array measurement. The single-snapshot measurement data is turned into a Hankel data matrix which admits the Vandermonde decomposition and is suitable for the MUSIC algorithm. The MUSIC algorithm amounts to finding the null space (the noise space) of the Hankel matrix, forming the noise-space correlation function and identifying the s smallest local minima of the noise-space correlation as the frequency set. In the noise-free case exact reconstruction is guaranteed for any arbitrary set of frequencies as long as the number of measurements is at least twice the number of distinct frequencies to be recovered. In the presence of noise the stability analysis shows that the perturbation of the noise-space correlation is proportional to the spectral norm of the noise matrix as long as the latter is smaller than the smallest (nonzero) singular value of the noiseless Hankel data matrix. Under the assumption that frequencies are separated by at least twice the Rayleigh Length (RL), the stability of the noise-space correlation is proved by means of novel discrete Ingham inequalities which provide bounds on nonzero singular values of the noiseless Hankel data matrix. The numerical performance of MUSIC is tested in comparison with other algorithms such as BLO-OMP and SDP (TV-min). While BLO-OMP is the stablest algorithm for frequencies separated above 4 RL, MUSIC becomes the best performing one for frequencies separated between 2 RL and 3 RL. Also, MUSIC is more efficient than other methods. MUSIC truly shines when the frequency separation drops to 1 RL or below when all other methods fail. Indeed, the resolution length of MUSIC decreases to zero as noise decreases to zero as a power law with an exponent much smaller than an upper bound established by Donoho.