Compressed sensing (CS) exploits the sparsity of a signal in order to integrate acquisition and compression. CS theory enables exact reconstruction of a sparse signal from relatively few linear measurements via a suitable nonlinear minimization proce
ss. Conventional CS theory relies on vectorial data representation, which results in good compression ratios at the expense of increased computational complexity. In applications involving color images, video sequences, and multi-sensor networks, the data is intrinsically of high-order, and thus more suitably represented in tensorial form. Standard applications of CS to higher-order data typically involve representation of the data as long vectors that are in turn measured using large sampling matrices, thus imposing a huge computational and memory burden. In this chapter, we introduce Generalized Tensor Compressed Sensing (GTCS)--a unified framework for compressed sensing of higher-order tensors which preserves the intrinsic structure of tensorial data with reduced computational complexity at reconstruction. We demonstrate that GTCS offers an efficient means for representation of multidimensional data by providing simultaneous acquisition and compression from all tensor modes. In addition, we propound two reconstruction procedures, a serial method (GTCS-S) and a parallelizable method (GTCS-P), both capable of recovering a tensor based on noiseless and noisy observations. We then compare the performance of the proposed methods with Kronecker compressed sensing (KCS) and multi-way compressed sensing (MWCS). We demonstrate experimentally that GTCS outperforms KCS and MWCS in terms of both reconstruction accuracy (within a range of compression ratios) and processing speed. The major disadvantage of our methods (and of MWCS as well), is that the achieved compression ratios may be worse than those offered by KCS.
