Nonuniform Sparse Recovery with Gaussian Matrices

Compressive sensing predicts that sufficiently sparse vectors can be recovered from highly incomplete information. Efficient recovery methods such as $\ell_1$-minimization find the sparsest solution to certain systems of equations. Random matrices have become a popular choice for the measurement matrix. Indeed, near-optimal uniform recovery results have been shown for such matrices. In this note we focus on nonuniform recovery using Gaussian random matrices and $\ell_1$-minimization. We provide a condition on the number of samples in terms of the sparsity and the signal length which guarantees that a fixed sparse signal can be recovered with a random draw of the matrix using $\ell_1$-minimization. The constant $2$ in the condition is optimal, and the proof is rather short compared to a similar result due to Donoho and Tanner.