[nuitblanche]

gane5h, thanks for the plug :)

For compressed sensing to work when one needs to know in advance that the signal (image or anything else really) is sparse or compressible, Once this is known, one needs two findings that are just plain surprising and are the reason there is so much excitement in this area:

- the signal needs to be acquired "incoherently" and there is much work going on in that area, Most hardware is currently not designed to do this incoherent acquisition (this can be done cheaply in MRI which is why you see some applications there) and much work is currently going into designing new sensors that can performed this new kind of acquisition, Much of them are listed here: http://igorcarron.googlepages.com/compressedsensinghardware

- once it is "incoherently" acquired, then one can reconstruct the original signal using linear programming technique solving an l1 problem, But after four years of intense competition between different groups, we now have faster solvers that are approximately solving the l1 problem without linear programming or the lp (p between 0 and 1) and even L0 problems..

For more information, you may want to check the blog or the big picture site: http://igorcarron.googlepages.com/cs