Weighted ell₁-Minimization for Sparse Recovery under Arbitrary Prior Information

Weighted $\ell_1$-minimization has been studied as a technique for the reconstruction of a sparse signal from compressively sampled measurements when prior information about the signal, in the form of a support estimate, is available. In this work, we study the recovery conditions and the associated recovery guarantees of weighted $\ell_1$-minimization when arbitrarily many distinct weights are permitted. For example, such a setup might be used when one has multiple estimates for the support of a signal, and these estimates have varying degrees of accuracy. Our analysis yields an extension to existing works that assume only a single support estimate set upon which a constant weight is applied. We include numerical experiments, with both synthetic signals and real video data, that demonstrate the benefits of allowing non-uniform weights in the reconstruction procedure.