Two-Dimensional Pattern-Coupled Sparse Bayesian Learning via Generalized Approximate Message Passing

We consider the problem of recovering 2D block-sparse signals with unknown cluster patterns. The 2D block-sparse patterns arise naturally in many practical applications, such as foreground detection and inverse synthetic aperture radar imaging. To exploit the underlying block-sparse structure, we propose a 2D pattern-coupled hierarchical Gaussian prior model. The proposed pattern-coupled hierarchical Gaussian prior model imposes a soft coupling mechanism among neighboring coefficients through their shared hyperparameters. This coupling mechanism enables effective and automatic learning of the underlying irregular cluster patterns, without requiring any a priori knowledge of the block partition of sparse signals. We develop a computationally efficient Bayesian inference method, which integrates the generalized approximate message passing technique with the proposed prior model. Simulation results show that the proposed method offers competitive recovery performance for a range of 2D sparse signal recovery and image processing applications over the existing method, meanwhile achieving a significant reduction in the computational complexity.