Expanding window compressed sensing for non-uniform compressible signals

Many practical compressible signals like image signals or the networked data in wireless sensor networks have non-uniform support distribution in their sparse representation domain. Utilizing this prior information, a novel compressed sensing (CS) scheme with unequal protection capability is proposed in this paper by introducing a windowing strategy called expanding window compressed sensing (EW-CS). According to the importance of different parts of the signal, the signal is divided into several nested subsets, i.e., the expanding windows. Each window generates its own measurements using a random sensing matrix. The more significant elements are contained by more windows, so they are captured by more measurements. This design makes the EW-CS scheme have more convenient implementation and better overall recovery quality for non-uniform compressible signals than ordinary CS schemes. These advantages are theoretically analyzed and experimentally confirmed. Moreover, the EW-CS scheme is applied to the compressed acquisition of image signals and networked data where it also has superior performance than ordinary CS and the existing unequal protection CS schemes.