An auto-parameter denoising method for nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy based on low-rank Hankel matrix

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, which is modeled as the sum of damped exponential signals, has become an indispensable tool in various scenarios, such as the structure and function determination, chemical analysis, and disease diagnosis. NMR spectroscopy signals, however, are usually corrupted by Gaussian noise in practice, raising difficulties in sequential analysis and quantification of the signals. The low-rank Hankel property plays an important role in the denoising issue, but selecting an appropriate parameter still remains a problem. In this work, we explore the effect of the regularization parameter of a convex optimization denoising method based on low-rank Hankel matrices for exponential signals corrupted by Gaussian noise. An accurate estimate on the spectral norm of weighted Hankel matrices is provided as a guidance to set the regularization parameter. The bound can be efficiently calculated since it only depends on the standard deviation of the noise and a constant. Aided by the bound, one can easily obtain an auto-setting regularization parameter to produce promising denoised results. Our experiments on synthetic and realistic NMR spectroscopy data demonstrate a superior denoising performance of our proposed approach in comparison with the typical Cadzow and the state-of-the-art QR decomposition methods, especially in the low signal-to-noise ratio regime.