Signals comprised of a stream of short pulses appear in many applications including bioimaging and radar. The recent finite rate of innovation framework, has paved the way to low rate sampling of such pulses by noticing that only a small number of parameters per unit time are needed to fully describe these signals. Unfortunately, for high rates of innovation, existing sampling schemes are numerically unstable. In this paper we propose a general sampling approach which leads to stable recovery even in the presence of many pulses. We begin by deriving a condition on the sampling kernel which allows perfect reconstruction of periodic streams from the minimal number of samples. We then design a compactly supported class of filters, satisfying this condition. The periodic solution is extended to finite and infinite streams and is shown to be numerically stable even for a large number of pulses. High noise robustness is also demonstrated when the delays are sufficiently separated. Finally, we process ultrasound imaging data using our techniques and show that substantial rate reduction with respect to traditional ultrasound sampling schemes can be achieved.
Another general family introduced in @cite_19 for the finite model is the class of exponential reproducing kernels. As a specific case, the authors propose E-spline sampling kernels. The CTFT of an E-spline of order @math is described by where @math are free parameters. In order to use E-splines as sampling kernels for pulse streams, the authors propose a specific structure on the @math 's, @math . Choosing exponents having a non-vanishing real part results in unstable weighting, as in the B-spline case. However, choosing the special case of pure imaginary exponents in the E-splines, already suggested by the authors, results in a reconstruction method based on Fourier coefficients, which demonstrates an interesting relation to our method. The Fourier coefficients are obtained by applying a matrix consisting of the exponent spanning coefficients @math , (see @cite_19 ), instead of our Vandermonde matrix relation . With this specific choice of parameters the E-spline function satisfies .
@cite_19
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We consider the problem of the reconstruction of a continuous-time function f(x) spl isin H from the samples of the responses of m linear shift-invariant systems sampled at 1 m the reconstruction rate. We extend Papoulis' generalized sampling theory in two important respects. First, our class of admissible input signals (typ. H=L sub 2 ) is considerably larger than the subspace of band-limited functions. Second, we use a more general specification of the reconstruction subspace V( spl psi ), so that the output of the system can take the form of a band-limited function, a spline, or a wavelet expansion. Since we have enlarged the class of admissible input functions, we have to give up Shannon and Papoulis' principle of an exact reconstruction. Instead, we seek an approximation f spl isin V( spl psi ) that is consistent in the sense that it produces exactly the same measurements as the input of the system. This leads to a generalization of Papoulis' sampling theorem and a practical reconstruction algorithm that takes the form of a multivariate filter. In particular, we show that the corresponding system acts as a projector from H onto V( spl psi ). We then propose two complementary polyphase and modulation domain interpretations of our solution. The polyphase representation leads to a simple understanding of our reconstruction algorithm in terms of a perfect reconstruction filter bank. The modulation analysis, on the other hand, is useful in providing the connection with Papoulis' earlier results for the band-limited case. Finally, we illustrate the general applicability of our theory by presenting new examples of interlaced and derivative sampling using splines. Consider the problem of sampling signals which are not bandlimited, but still have a finite number of degrees of freedom per unit of time, such as, for example, nonuniform splines or piecewise polynomials, and call the number of degrees of freedom per unit of time the rate of innovation. Classical sampling theory does not enable a perfect reconstruction of such signals since they are not bandlimited. Recently, it was shown that, by using an adequate sampling kernel and a sampling rate greater or equal to the rate of innovation, it is possible to reconstruct such signals uniquely . These sampling schemes, however, use kernels with infinite support, and this leads to complex and potentially unstable reconstruction algorithms. In this paper, we show that many signals with a finite rate of innovation can be sampled and perfectly reconstructed using physically realizable kernels of compact support and a local reconstruction algorithm. The class of kernels that we can use is very rich and includes functions satisfying Strang-Fix conditions, exponential splines and functions with rational Fourier transform. This last class of kernels is quite general and includes, for instance, any linear electric circuit. We, thus, show with an example how to estimate a signal of finite rate of innovation at the output of an RC circuit. The case of noisy measurements is also analyzed, and we present a novel algorithm that reduces the effect of noise by oversampling In a companion paper (see Self-Similarity: Part I-Splines and Operators), we characterized the class of scale-invariant convolution operators: the generalized fractional derivatives of order gamma. We used these operators to specify regularization functionals for a series of Tikhonov-like least-squares data fitting problems and proved that the general solution is a fractional spline of twice the order. We investigated the deterministic properties of these smoothing splines and proposed a fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based implementation. Here, we present an alternative stochastic formulation to further justify these fractional spline estimators. As suggested by the title, the relevant processes are those that are statistically self-similar; that is, fractional Brownian motion (fBm) and its higher order extensions. To overcome the technical difficulties due to the nonstationary character of fBm, we adopt a distributional formulation due to Gel'fand. This allows us to rigorously specify an innovation model for these fractal processes, which rests on the property that they can be whitened by suitable fractional differentiation. Using the characteristic form of the fBm, we then derive the conditional probability density function (PDF) p(BH(t)|Y), where Y= BH(k)+n[k] kisinZ are the noisy samples of the fBm BH(t) with Hurst exponent H. We find that the conditional mean is a fractional spline of degree 2H, which proves that this class of functions is indeed optimal for the estimation of fractal-like processes. The result also yields the optimal [minimum mean-square error (MMSE)] parameters for the smoothing spline estimator, as well as the connection with kriging and Wiener filtering The authors consider classes of signals that have a finite number of degrees of freedom per unit of time and call this number the rate of innovation. Examples of signals with a finite rate of innovation include streams of Diracs (e.g., the Poisson process), nonuniform splines, and piecewise polynomials. Even though these signals are not bandlimited, we show that they can be sampled uniformly at (or above) the rate of innovation using an appropriate kernel and then be perfectly reconstructed. Thus, we prove sampling theorems for classes of signals and kernels that generalize the classic "bandlimited and sinc kernel" case. In particular, we show how to sample and reconstruct periodic and finite-length streams of Diracs, nonuniform splines, and piecewise polynomials using sinc and Gaussian kernels. For infinite-length signals with finite local rate of innovation, we show local sampling and reconstruction based on spline kernels. The key in all constructions is to identify the innovative part of a signal (e.g., time instants and weights of Diracs) using an annihilating or locator filter: a device well known in spectral analysis and error-correction coding. This leads to standard computational procedures for solving the sampling problem, which we show through experimental results. Applications of these new sampling results can be found in signal processing, communications systems, and biological systems.