Estimation and Uncertainty Quantification for Piecewise Smooth Signal Recovery

Abstract

This paper presents an application of the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) algorithm to linear inverse problems with a high order total variation (HOTV) sparsity prior. For the problem of sparse signal recovery, SBL often produces more accurate estimates than maximum a posteriori estimates, including those that use $\ell_1$ regularization. Moreover, rather than a single signal estimate, SBL yields a full posterior density estimate which can be used for uncertainty quantification. However, SBL is only immediately applicable to problems having a direct sparsity prior, or to those that can be formed via synthesis. This paper demonstrates how a problem with an HOTV sparsity prior can be formulated via synthesis, and then utilizes SBL. This expands the class of problems available to Bayesian learning to include, e.g., inverse problems dealing with the recovery of piecewise smooth functions or signals from data. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate how this new technique is effectively employed.