The springback penalty for robust signal recovery

We propose a new penalty, named as the springback penalty, for constructing models to recover an unknown signal from incomplete and inaccurate measurements. Mathematically, the springback penalty is a weakly convex function, and it bears various theoretical and computational advantages of both the benchmark convex $\ell_1$ penalty and many of its non-convex surrogates that have been well studied in the literature. For the recovery model using the springback penalty, we establish the exact and stable recovery theory for both sparse and nearly sparse signals, respectively, and derive an easily implementable difference-of-convex algorithm. In particular, we show its theoretical superiority to some existing models with a sharper recovery bound for some scenarios where the level of measurement noise is large or the amount of measurements is limited, and demonstrate its numerical robustness regardless of varying coherence of the sensing matrix. Because of its theoretical guarantee of recovery with severe measurements, computational tractability, and numerical robustness for ill-conditioned sensing matrices, the springback penalty is particularly favorable for the scenario where the incomplete and inaccurate measurements are collected by coherence-hidden or -static sensing hardware.