Super-resolution of near-colliding point sources

Abstract

Abstract We consider the problem of stable recovery of sparse signals of the form $$\begin{equation*}F(x)=\sum_{j=1}^d a_j\delta(x-x_j),\quad x_j\in\mathbb{R},\;a_j\in\mathbb{C}, \end{equation*}$$from their spectral measurements, known in a bandwidth $\varOmega $ with absolute error not exceeding $\epsilon>0$. We consider the case when at most $p\leqslant d$ nodes $\{x_j\}$ of $F$ form a cluster whose extent is smaller than the Rayleigh limit ${1\over \varOmega }$, while the rest of the nodes is well separated. Provided that $\epsilon \lessapprox \operatorname{SRF}^{-2p+1}$, where $\operatorname{SRF}=(\varOmega \varDelta )^{-1}$ and $\varDelta $ is the minimal separation between the nodes, we show that the minimax error rate for reconstruction of the cluster nodes is of order ${1\over \varOmega }\operatorname{SRF}^{2p-1}\epsilon $, while for recovering the corresponding amplitudes $\{a_j\}$ the rate is of the order $\operatorname{SRF}^{2p-1}\epsilon $. Moreover, the corresponding minimax rates for the recovery of the non-clustered nodes and amplitudes are ${\epsilon \over \varOmega }$ and $\epsilon $, respectively. These results suggest that stable super-resolution is possible in much more general situations than previously thought. Our numerical experiments show that the well-known matrix pencil method achieves the above accuracy bounds.