
PREPRINT 1
Decimated Prony’s method for stable
super-resolution
Rami Katz, Nuha Diab, and Dmitry Batenkov
Abstract—We study recovery of amplitudes and nodes of a
finite impulse train from noisy frequency samples. This problem
is known as super-resolution under sparsity constraints and
has numerous applications. An especially challenging scenario
occurs when the separation between Dirac pulses is smaller than
the Nyquist-Shannon-Rayleigh limit. Despite large volumes of
research and well-established worst-case recovery bounds, there
is currently no known computationally efficient method which
achieves these bounds in practice. In this work we combine
the well-known Prony’s method for exponential fitting with
a recently established decimation technique for analyzing the
super-resolution problem in the above mentioned regime. We
show that our approach attains optimal asymptotic stability in
the presence of noise, and has lower computational complexity
than the current state of the art methods.
Index Terms—Prony’s method, decimation, sparse super-
resolution, direction of arrival, sub Nyquist sampling, finite rate
of innovation
I. INTRODUCTION
VARIOUS problems of signal reconstruction in multiple
basic and applied settings can be reduced to recovering
the amplitudes {αk}n
k=1 and nodes {xk}n
k=1 of a finite impulse
train f(x) = Pn
k=1 αkδ(x−xk)from band-limited and noisy
spectral measurements
g(ω) =
n
X
k=1
αke2πjxkω+e(ω), ω ∈[−Ω,Ω],(1)
where Ω>0and kek∞≤for some > 0. Due to
its widespread applications, this problem has been studied
under various guises including tauberian approximation [1],
parametric spectrum estimation and direction of arrival [2],
[3], time-delay estimation [4], sparse deconvolution [5], super-
resolution (SR) [6], [7] and finite-rate-of-innovation sampling
[8], [9]. Beyond the theoretical modelling, recent advances
have shown (1) to be the work-horse for emerging areas such
as super-resolution tomography and spectroscopy [10], [11],
ultra-fast time-of-flight imaging [12] and unlimited sensing
[13]; in such cases, efficient and robust solutions to (1) entail
pushing real-world capabilities beyond the possibilities of
conventional hardware.
Despite the theoretical advances on this topic (works cited
above and follow-up literature), there are still fundamental
Submitted for review on March 24th, 2023. N. Diab and D. Batenkov are
supported by the Israel Science Foundation Grant 1793/20 and a collaborative
grant from the Volkswagen Foundation.
R. Katz is with the School of Electrical Engineering, Tel Aviv
University, Tel Aviv, Israel (e-mail: ramikatz@mail.tau.ac.il). N. Diab and
D. Batenkov are with the Department of Applied Mathematics, School
of Mathematical Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel (e-mail:
nuhadiab@tauex.tau.ac.il, dbatenkov@tauex.tau.ac.il).
research gaps that arise due to ill-posedness and instability
of (1) in the presence of noise. In particular, an especially
challenging regime occurs when the separation ∆between two
or more nodes is smaller than the Nyquist-Shannon-Rayleigh
(NSR) limit 1/Ω. Recently, min-max error bounds for SR
in the noisy regime were derived in the case when some
nodes form a dense cluster [14], [15], [16], establishing the
fundamental limits of recovery in the SR problem (cf. Sect. II).
However, a tractable and provably optimal algorithm has been
missing from the literature.
In this work we develop a reconstruction algorithm inspired
by the decimation approach [17], [18] (cf.[19], [14], [16],
[15] and also [20], [21]). Our procedure (Sect. III) relies
on sampling g(ω)at 2nequispaced and maximally separated
frequencies, followed by solving the SR problem thus obtained
by applying the classical Prony’s method for exponential
fitting [22], whose accuracy has been recently established
in [23]. For success of the approach, care needs to be
taken to avoid node aliasing and collisions. Inspired by
[15], this is achieved by considering sufficiently many
decimated sub-problems. The result is a tractable algorithm,
dubbed the Decimated Prony’s method (DPM), which has
lower computational complexity than the well-established and
frequently used ESPRIT algorithm (see e.g. [24]). We further
provide theoretical and numerical evidence which show that
DPM achieves the optimal asymptotic stability and noise
tolerance guaranteed in the literature. We believe that our
results pave the way to developing robust procedures for
optimal solution of problems derived from (1).
II. TOWARDS OPTIMAL ALGORITHMS
Throughout the paper we consider the number of nodes
(resp. amplitudes) n∈ {1,2, . . . }in (1) to be fixed. We
assume that the nodes satisfy {xk}n
k=1 ⊆−1
2,1
2. By
rescaling the data (1), this assumption poses no loss of
generality (see Section 4 in [15]). Let {˜xk}n
k=1 and {˜αk}n
k=1
be the approximated parameters obtained via a reconstruction
algorithm using the data (1).
Definition 1 ([15]).Let {(αk, xk)}n
k=1 ⊆U. Given > 0, the
min-max recovery rates are
Λx,j
,U,Ω= inf
A:g7→{˜αj,˜xj}sup
{αj,xj}
sup
kek∞≤
|xj−˜xj|,
Λα,j
,U,Ω= inf
A:g7→{˜αj,˜xj}sup
{αj,xj}
sup
kek∞≤
|αj−˜αj|.
Here Uis some fixed subset in the parameter space, whereas
the infimum is over the set of all reconstruction algorithms A
which employ the data (1).
arXiv:2210.13329v4 [math.NA] 27 Mar 2023