Sparse component separation for accurate CMB map estimation
  The Cosmological Microwave Background (CMB) is of premier importance for the
cosmologists to study the birth of our universe. Unfortunately, most CMB
experiments such as COBE, WMAP or Planck do not provide a direct measure of the
cosmological signal; CMB is mixed up with galactic foregrounds and point
sources. For the sake of scientific exploitation, measuring the CMB requires
extracting several different astrophysical components (CMB, Sunyaev-Zel'dovich
clusters, galactic dust) form multi-wavelength observations. Mathematically
speaking, the problem of disentangling the CMB map from the galactic
foregrounds amounts to a component or source separation problem. In the field
of CMB studies, a very large range of source separation methods have been
applied which all differ from each other in the way they model the data and the
criteria they rely on to separate components. Two main difficulties are i) the
instrument's beam varies across frequencies and ii) the emission laws of most
astrophysical components vary across pixels. This paper aims at introducing a
very accurate modeling of CMB data, based on sparsity, accounting for beams
variability across frequencies as well as spatial variations of the components'
spectral characteristics. Based on this new sparse modeling of the data, a
sparsity-based component separation method coined Local-Generalized
Morphological Component Analysis (L-GMCA) is described. Extensive numerical
experiments have been carried out with simulated Planck data. These experiments
show the high efficiency of the proposed component separation methods to
estimate a clean CMB map with a very low foreground contamination, which makes
L-GMCA of prime interest for CMB studies.
