text: Signals comprised of a stream of short pulses appear in many applications including bioimaging and radar. The recent finite rate of innovation framework, has paved the way to low rate sampling of such pulses by noticing that only a small number of parameters per unit time are needed to fully describe these signals. Unfortunately, for high rates of innovation, existing sampling schemes are numerically unstable. In this paper we propose a general sampling approach which leads to stable recovery even in the presence of many pulses. We begin by deriving a condition on the sampling kernel which allows perfect reconstruction of periodic streams from the minimal number of samples. We then design a compactly supported class of filters, satisfying this condition. The periodic solution is extended to finite and infinite streams and is shown to be numerically stable even for a large number of pulses. High noise robustness is also demonstrated when the delays are sufficiently separated. Finally, we process ultrasound imaging data using our techniques and show that substantial rate reduction with respect to traditional ultrasound sampling schemes can be achieved.
  @cite_19: Consider the problem of sampling signals which are not bandlimited, but still have a finite number of degrees of freedom per unit of time, such as, for example, nonuniform splines or piecewise polynomials, and call the number of degrees of freedom per unit of time the rate of innovation. Classical sampling theory does not enable a perfect reconstruction of such signals since they are not bandlimited. Recently, it was shown that, by using an adequate sampling kernel and a sampling rate greater or equal to the rate of innovation, it is possible to reconstruct such signals uniquely . These sampling schemes, however, use kernels with infinite support, and this leads to complex and potentially unstable reconstruction algorithms. In this paper, we show that many signals with a finite rate of innovation can be sampled and perfectly reconstructed using physically realizable kernels of compact support and a local reconstruction algorithm. The class of kernels that we can use is very rich and includes functions satisfying Strang-Fix conditions, exponential splines and functions with rational Fourier transform. This last class of kernels is quite general and includes, for instance, any linear electric circuit. We, thus, show with an example how to estimate a signal of finite rate of innovation at the output of an RC circuit. The case of noisy measurements is also analyzed, and we present a novel algorithm that reduces the effect of noise by oversampling
summary: The work in @cite_19 addressed the infinite stream case, with @math . They proposed filtering the signal with a polynomial reproducing sampling kernel prior to sampling. If the signal has at most @math diracs within any interval of duration @math , where @math denotes the support of the sampling filter and @math the sampling period, then the samples are a sufficient characterization of the signal. This condition allows to divide the infinite stream into a sequence of finite case problems. In our approach the quiet phases of @math between the bursts of length @math enable the reduction to the finite case.