Compressed Sensing Reconstruction: Comparative
Study with Applications to ECG Bio-Signals
Anna M.R. Dixon, Emily G. Allstot, Andrew Y. Chen, Daibashish Gangopadhyay, and David J. Allstot
Department of Electrical Engineering
Univ. of Washington
Seattle, WA, USA
amrdixon@ee.washington.edu
Abstract—Compressed sensing (CS) is a rapidly emerging signal
processing technique that enables accurate capture and
reconstruction of sparse signals from only a fraction of Nyquist-
rate samples, significantly reducing the data-rate and system
power consumption. This paper presents an in-depth
comparative study on current state-of-the-art CS reconstruction
algorithms. Reliability, accuracy, noise tolerance, computation
time and are used as key metrics. Further, experiments on ECG
signals are used to assess performance on real-world bio-signals.
I. INTRODUCTION
Compressed sensing (CS) [1] is revolutionizing the
domain of signal acquisition. This innovative concept allows a
signal to be acquired and accurately reconstructed with
significantly fewer samples than required by Nyquist-rate
sampling. Unlike Nyquist sampling, which relies on the
maximum rate-of-change of a signal, compressive sampling
relies on the maximum rate-of-information in a signal. Sparse
signals, such as an electrocardiogram (ECG) bio-signal,
exhibit this difference in rate which is utilized by CS to enable
low-data-rate acquisition. The accuracy of reconstruction
increases with increased sparsity of the signal being acquired.
The reconstruction of signals acquired with CS involves an
optimization which seeks the best solution to an under-
determined set of linear equations with no prior knowledge of
the original signal except that it is sparse in the sampled
domain. Of the several CS recovery algorithms currently in
use, most can be classified as variants of convex-optimization
or greedy algorithms where the L1-norm is widely used as the
measure of signal sparsity. Initially L1-norm convex
optimization was chosen for its stability and high accuracy [1].
Various greedy reconstruction algorithms have recently gained
prominence by demonstrating a healthy trade-off of accuracy
versus computational complexity [2]-[5].
This paper presents a comprehensive comparative study of
five leading state-of-art compressed sensing reconstruction
algorithms. It aims to provide insight into their approach,
functionality and performance trade-offs. Further, and as an
application-specific study, experiments are performed on real-
world ECG bio-signals sampled with CS and then
reconstructed using these algorithms.
This work was supported by a grant from the Intel Corp., Hillsboro, OR.
978-1-4244-9472-9/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE
Section II overviews the general approaches and
theoretical performance limits of the different reconstruction
algorithms. Section III presents experimental results that
quantitatively compare the advantages and disadvantages of
the algorithms over several key metrics. Section IV describes
a case study on ECG signal reconstruction and Section V
presents qualitative conclusions from the experiments.
II. COMPRESSED SENSING AND STATE-OF-THE-ART
RECONSTRUCTION ALGORITHMS
CS is a non-adaptive scheme modeled by:
(1)
where is a vector of discrete-time Nyquist-rate
samples of an analog signal, is the so-called
measurement or sensing matrix, e is observation noise and
is the compressed output vector. CS captures M <<
N measurements from N Nyquist samples using random linear
projections [1]. The sensing matrix is formulated by selecting
random entries from uniform, Gaussian or Bernoulli
probability density functions. CS is successful on either time-
or frequency-sparse signals. Further, to achieve accurate and
numerically stable compression and reconstruction, Candès
recommends [1]:
(2)
where k is the number of non-zero entries in the X vector.
In a noise-free environment, the reconstruction problem can
be posed as solving , where there are N unknowns
in reconstructed signal and M knowns in measured signal .
The matrix is non-square and thus non-invertible. Because
this problem is under-determined, there are potentially several
signals, , that satisfy (1). Thus, the reconstruction algorithms
are required to search for the correct within the search
space using a sparsity-measure (such as L1-norm) as an
objective function. Table I gives an overview of several state-
of-the-art reconstruction algorithms including the general
optimization objectives and the theoretical computation times.
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 Table I. Compressed Sensing Reconstruction Algorithm Overview
Theoretical Comp.
CS Reconstruction Algorithm Algorithm Objective Time
Convex Optimization [6] Search the space for a solution with the minimum 2 1.5
O(m n )
L1-norm
Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) [2] Find the column of Φ with the strongest correlation O(kmn)
to the residual
Compressive Sampling Matching Pursuit Find the top 2K columns of Φ with the strongest O(log(k)mn)
(CoSaMP) [3] correlation to the residual
Regularized Orthogonal Least Squares Find the column of Φ that minimizes the residual of O(kmn)
(ROLS) [4] that column’s solution
Normalized Iterative Hard Thresholding (NIHT) [5] Find the top 2K values of the sum of the previous O(log(k)mn)
best guess and the residual’s signal proxy

As noted previously, CS reconstruction algorithms can be

divided into two distinct classes: convex optimization and
greedy algorithms.

A. Convex Optimization
Convex optimization is the original compressed sensing
reconstruction algorithm [1]. Ideally, the compressed sensing
signal recovery is defined as a basis pursuit optimization
problem:

(3)
which can be cast as a linear programming problem. However,
for the signal reconstruction to be robust to noise, the
constraints of the optimization problem are relaxed to give:

(4)
This type of convex optimization problem, also known as
the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) or
basis pursuit de-noising (BPDN), is solved using second-order
cone programming.
L1-norm convex optimization is the current standard
approach to basis pursuit problems primarily due to its proven
stability. The convex optimization problems are implemented
in this work with the open-source software CVX [6]. CVX uses
a primal-dual interior-point method to solve (3) and (4).
B. Greedy Algortihms
Unlike convex optimization, greedy algorithms solve the
reconstruction problem in a less exact manner. They function
by greedily optimizing a metric that predicts error
minimization.
Matching pursuit, one class of CS reconstruction greedy
algorithms, attempts to find the columns of the measurement
matrix ( is commonly referred to as an “over-complete
dictionary” in this context) that have the most participation in
the measurement . For each iteration the column(s) of
with the strongest correlation to the residual is added to the
support vector and its contribution is subtracted from the
residual. In orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP), only one
column of (or “atom”) is added to the support vector per
iteration. In CoSaMP (Compressed Sampling Matching
Pursuit), a specialized adaption of matching pursuit for
Fig. 1. Probability of exact recovery
compressed sensing [3], the top 2k columns of Φ are added to
the support vector per iteration and later pruned.
Orthogonal least squares (OLS) [4], like OMP, selects the
column of that minimizes the residual per iteration. Unlike
matching pursuit, OLS evaluates each possible index’s
resulting residual before selection.
A more recent state-of-the-art reconstruction algorithm is
normalized iterative hard thresholding (NIHT) [5]. This
method differs from the greedy algorithms described above by
not directly searching for the columns of that reduce the
residual error. Instead NIHT operates by iteratively selecting
solutions that both minimize the residual and maximize the
difference between the current and previous solutions.
III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
In order to maintain consistency with the experimental setups
used in existing works [2][5] the measurement matrix
was populated with independent and
identically distributed (i.i.d.) Gaussian random entries,
achieving a 4X data compression (i.e. N/M = 4). k-spike
signals, , were synthesized by assigning randomly
the distributed k elements to values from the i.i.d. Gaussian
distribution with all points set to zero. Sparsity levels were
varied by adjusting k. Results were averaged over an ensemble
of 100 k-spike sample signals for each sparsity level.

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 (a)
Fig. 2. SNR of reconstructed signals for the original signal ensemble having (a) 60 dB SNR, and (b) 80 dB SNR
Fig. 3. Computation time
A. Reliability
The most common performance metric is the reliability of
signal recovery. In CS it is the probability that the
reconstruction algorithm will correctly recover the signal. This
is of particular importance here because the reconstruction
algorithms have a tendency to find local optima that do not
necessarily represent the signal of interest.
Fig. 1 shows the probability of exact signal recovery, which
increases with the sparsity of . All of the reconstruction
curves show success above 88% sparsity. OMP produces the
most reliable reconstruction at low sparsity levels whereas
ROLS is unable to produce accurate results until the sparsity
exceeds 97%. Convex optimization, CoSaMP, and NIHT all
exhibit moderate reliability.
B. Accuracy and Noise Tolerance
In a real data acquisition system, the high sparsity values
needed for exact recovery (Fig. 1) may not be guaranteed.
Furthermore, the sampled-data acquisition systems that CS
targets are inherently noisy. Thus, a more realistic measure for
signal recovery accuracy is presented (Fig. 2) as measured by
the signal to noise ratio:
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(b)
(5)
The reconstruction accuracies for the SNR = 60 dB and
SNR = 80 dB cases are shown. The signals were synthesized by
summing additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) with the
compressed signal . CoSaMP, OMP and NIHT meet their
respective SNR targets at high sparsity levels and demonstrate
robust noise tolerance whereas L1-norm convex and ROLS
show moderate noise resilience with a loss of ~10 dB SNR at
peak performance levels.
C. Computation Time
Computation time is the primary objective for exploring
potential greedy solutions as it has direct impact on energy
efficiency and real-time application feasibility. Fig. 3 compares
the computation time of these algorithms. ROLS and OMP
required the least computation time. Convex optimization has
higher computational complexity than most greedy solutions
but is notably independent of sparsity. CoSaMP shows the
largest computation time, most likely due to the high tolerance
requirements for convergence and the costly pseudo-inverse
calculations per iteration. Needell, et al. [3] further recommend
a fast multiply strategy to improve computation time (at the
expense of accuracy) that is not explored here.
IV. ECG BIO-SIGNAL CASE STUDY
The ultimate goal of this study is to apply the compressed
sensing method to real-world applications, such as in
biomedical signal acquisition systems leading to efficient, low-
power body area networks. The case study presented here
explores the tradeoffs in the choice of a compressed sensing
reconstruction algorithm in an ECG sensor application.
More than 50 hours of ECG signals was collected from the
Physiobank® database [8]. The ECG signal is windowed to
1024 samples, and dynamically thresholded [7] to control
signal sparsity. Fig. 4 shows the effects of the dynamic-
thresholding level in increasing sparsity. For higher thresholds,
sparsity increases at the cost of detail in ECG signal features.
For example, at 75% sparsity, most of the ECG QRS complex
 Fig. 5. ECG signal reconstruction comparison of (a) original signal with 92% sparsity using (b) L1-norm convex optimization, (c) CoSaMP, (d) OMP, (e)
NIHT and (f) ROLS

Fig. 4. Sparsity level considerations for ECG analysis

features are lost. To account for sampling circuit noise, AWGN

was added to the thresholded signal such that the compressed
ECG signal achieved 80 dB SNR (typical of an ECG sensor
analog front-end). Compression was achieved with a 6-bit Fig. 6. ECG signal reconstruction SNR.
precision 512 x 1024 Gaussian measurement matrix. Table II. Reconstruction Algorithm Qualitative Assessment
Fig. 5 shows the time-domain ECG original and Signal Reconstruction Reliability/ Speed
reconstructed waveforms for each algorithm. Most algorithms Algorithm Accuracy
capture the QRS complex but NIHT and ROLS add significant Convex Fair Fair
artifacts, which limits their use for ECG applications. CoSaMP Good Bad
ECG bio-signal reconstruction accuracy, computation time OMP Good Good
and noise tolerance were consistent with the results of Section NIHT Fair Fair
ROLS Bad Good
III. Fig. 6 shows the SNR of the ECG signal reconstructions.
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