An introduction to cosparse signal reconstruction

Undersampling techniques in exploration seismology usually relies on the assumption that seismic records and images permit sparse approximations under certain representations, such as Curvelet coefficients. Recent findings have suggested that for redundant representations (of which Curvelet is an example), the analysis operator that maps the physical signal to coefficients may also play a crucial role in recovering data from incomplete observations. In particular, the number of zero-valued coefficients given by the analysis operator acting on the signal, referred to as its "cosparsity", have an analogous role to the sparsity of the signal in terms of the coefficients. The cosparsity of the signal permits recovery guarantees that are completely separate from sparsity-based models, and gives rise to distinct sets of reconstruction algorithms and performances compared to sparsity-based approaches. We present in this talk some initial findings on the viability of cosparse reconstruction for a variety of seismic applications that previously relied on sparse signal reconstruction, such as data interpolation and source separation.