We consider the problem of robustly recovering a @math -sparse coefficient vector from the Fourier series that it generates, restricted to the interval @math . The difficulty of this problem is linked to the superresolution factor SRF, equal to the ratio of the Rayleigh length (inverse of @math ) by the spacing of the grid supporting the sparse vector. In the presence of additive deterministic noise of norm @math , we show upper and lower bounds on the minimax error rate that both scale like @math , providing a partial answer to a question posed by Donoho in 1992. The scaling arises from comparing the noise level to a restricted isometry constant at sparsity @math , or equivalently from comparing @math to the so-called @math -spark of the Fourier system. The proof involves new bounds on the singular values of restricted Fourier matrices, obtained in part from old techniques in complex analysis.
This paper studies sparse spikes deconvolution over the space of measures. We focus our attention to the recovery properties of the support of the measure, i.e. the location of the Dirac masses. For non-degenerate sums of Diracs, we show that, when the signal-to-noise ratio is large enough, total variation regularization (which is the natural extension of the L1 norm of vectors to the setting of measures) recovers the exact same number of Diracs. We also show that both the locations and the heights of these Diracs converge toward those of the input measure when the noise drops to zero. The exact speed of convergence is governed by a specific dual certificate, which can be computed by solving a linear system. We draw connections between the support of the recovered measure on a continuous domain and on a discretized grid. We show that when the signal-to-noise level is large enough, the solution of the discretized problem is supported on pairs of Diracs which are neighbors of the Diracs of the input measure. This gives a precise description of the convergence of the solution of the discretized problem toward the solution of the continuous grid-free problem, as the grid size tends to zero.