In this paper we develop a general theory of compressed sensing for analog signals, in close similarity to prior results for vectors in finite dimensional spaces that are sparse in a given orthonormal basis. The signals are modeled by functions in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. Sparsity is defined as the minimal number of terms in expansions based on the kernel functions. Minimizing this number is under certain conditions equivalent to minimizing an atomic norm, the pre-dual of the supremum norm for functions in the Hilbert space. The norm minimizer is shown to exist based on a compactness argument. Recovery based on minimizing the atomic norm is robust and stable, so it provides controllable accuracy for recovery when the signal is only approximately sparse and the measurement is corrupted by noise. As applications of the theory, we include results on the recovery of sparse bandlimited functions and functions that have a sparse inverse short-time Fourier transform.
Consider the problem of recovering a measure @math supported on a lattice of span @math , when measurements are only available concerning the Fourier Transform @math at frequencies @math . If @math is much smaller than the Nyquist frequency @math and the measurements are noisy, then, in general, stable recovery of @math is impossible. In this paper it is shown that if, in addition, we know that the measure @math satisfies certain sparsity constraints, then stable recovery is possible. Say that a set has Rayleigh index less than or equal to R if in any interval of length @math there are at most R elements. Indeed, if the (unknown) support of @math is known, a priori, to have Rayleigh index at most R, then stable recovery is possible with a stability coefficient that grows at most like @math as @math . This result validates certain practical efforts, in spectroscopy, seismic prospecting, and astrono...