Compressed Shattering

The central idea of compressed sensing is to exploit the fact that most signals of interest are sparse in some domain and use this to reduce the number of measurements to encode. However, if the sparsity of the input signal is not precisely known, but known to lie within a specified range, compressed sensing as such cannot exploit this fact and would need to use the same number of measurements even for a very sparse signal. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Compressed Shattering to adapt compressed sensing to the specified sparsity range, without changing the sensing matrix by creating shattered signals which have fixed sparsity. This is accomplished by first suitably permuting the input spectrum and then using a filter bank to create fixed sparsity shattered signals. By ensuring that all the shattered signals are utmost 1-sparse, we make use of a simple but efficient deterministic sensing matrix to yield very low number of measurements. For a discrete-time signal of length 1000, with a sparsity range of $5 - 25$, traditional compressed sensing requires $175$ measurements, whereas Compressed Shattering would only need $20 - 100$ measurements.