Convolutional Sparse Support Estimator Network (CSEN) From energy efficient support estimation to learning-aided Compressive Sensing

TL;DR

This paper introduces Convolutional Support Estimator Networks (CSENs), a learning-based approach for support estimation in sparse signals that enhances efficiency and performance over traditional methods.

Contribution

The study presents a novel, compact CNN-based support estimator that directly maps measurements to support sets, improving speed and accuracy in sparse signal support estimation.

Findings

CSEN achieves state-of-the-art support estimation accuracy.

The approach significantly reduces computational complexity.

CSEN enhances sparse recovery performance when used as prior information.

Abstract

Support estimation (SE) of a sparse signal refers to finding the location indices of the non-zero elements in a sparse representation. Most of the traditional approaches dealing with SE problem are iterative algorithms based on greedy methods or optimization techniques. Indeed, a vast majority of them use sparse signal recovery techniques to obtain support sets instead of directly mapping the non-zero locations from denser measurements (e.g., Compressively Sensed Measurements). This study proposes a novel approach for learning such a mapping from a training set. To accomplish this objective, the Convolutional Support Estimator Networks (CSENs), each with a compact configuration, are designed. The proposed CSEN can be a crucial tool for the following scenarios: (i) Real-time and low-cost support estimation can be applied in any mobile and low-power edge device for anomaly localization, simultaneous face recognition, etc. (ii) CSEN's output can directly be used as "prior information" which improves the performance of sparse signal recovery algorithms. The results over the benchmark datasets show that state-of-the-art performance levels can be achieved by the proposed approach with a significantly reduced computational complexity.