A null space analysis of the L1 synthesis method in dictionary-based compressed sensing

Abstract: An interesting topic in compressed sensing aims to recover signals with sparse representations in a dictionary. Recently the performance of the L1-analysis method has been a focus, while some fundamental problems for the L1-synthesis method are still unsolved. For example, what are the conditions for it to stably recover compressible signals under noise? Whether coherent dictionaries allow the existence of sensing matrices that guarantee good performances of the L1-synthesis method? To answer these questions, we build up a framework for the L1-synthesis method. In particular, we propose a dictionary-based null space property DNSP which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first sufficient and necessary condition for the success of L1-synthesis without measurement noise. With this new property, we show that when the dictionary D is full spark, it cannot be too coherent otherwise the method fails for all sensing matrices. We also prove that in the real case, DNSP is equivalent to the stability of L1-synthesis under noise.