Circulant and Toeplitz matrices in compressed sensing

Compressed sensing seeks to recover a sparse vector from a small number of linear and non-adaptive measurements. While most work so far focuses on Gaussian or Bernoulli random measurements we investigate the use of partial random circulant and Toeplitz matrices in connection with recovery by $\ell_1$-minization. In contrast to recent work in this direction we allow the use of an arbitrary subset of rows of a circulant and Toeplitz matrix. Our recovery result predicts that the necessary number of measurements to ensure sparse reconstruction by $\ell_1$-minimization with random partial circulant or Toeplitz matrices scales linearly in the sparsity up to a $\log$-factor in the ambient dimension. This represents a significant improvement over previous recovery results for such matrices. As a main tool for the proofs we use a new version of the non-commutative Khintchine inequality.