How to find real-world applications for compressive sensing

The potential of compressive sensing (CS) has spurred great interest in the research community and is a fast growing area of research. However, research translating CS theory into practical hardware and demonstrating clear and significant benefits with this hardware over current, conventional imaging techniques has been limited. This article helps researchers to find those niche applications where the CS approach provides substantial gain over conventional approaches by articulating lessons learned in finding one such application; sea skimming missile detection. As a proof of concept, it is demonstrated that a simplified CS missile detection architecture and algorithm provides comparable results to the conventional imaging approach but using a smaller FPA.