Tree-based pursuit: Algorithm and properties

This paper proposes a tree-based pursuit algorithm that efficiently trades off complexity and approximation performance for overcomplete signal expansions. Finding the sparsest representation of a signal using a redundant dictionary is, in general, an NP-hard problem. Even suboptimal algorithms such as Matching Pursuit remain highly complex. We propose a structuring strategy that can be applied to any redundant set of functions, and which basically groups similar atoms together. A measure of similarity based on coherence allows for representing a highly redundant subdictionary of atoms by a unique element, called molecule. When the clustering is applied recursively on atoms and then on molecules, it naturally leads to the creation of a tree structure. We then present a new pursuit algorithm that uses the structure created by clustering as a decision tree. This tree-based algorithm offers important complexity reduction with respect to Matching Pursuit, as it prunes important parts of the dictionary when traversing the tree. Recent results on incoherent dictionaries are extended to molecules, while the true highly redundant nature of the dictionary stays hidden by the tree structure. We-then derive recovery conditions on the structured dictionary, under which tree-based pursuit is guaranteed to converge. Experimental results finally show that the gain in complexity offered by tree-based pursuit does in general not have a high penalty on the approximation performance. They show that the dimensionality of the problem is reduced thanks to the tree construction, without significant loss of information.