  We study the compressed sensing (CS) signal estimation problem where an input
signal is measured via a linear matrix multiplication under additive noise.
While this setup usually assumes sparsity or compressibility in the input
signal during recovery, the signal structure that can be leveraged is often not
known a priori. In this paper, we consider universal CS recovery, where the
statistics of a stationary ergodic signal source are estimated simultaneously
with the signal itself. Inspired by Kolmogorov complexity and minimum
description length, we focus on a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation
framework that leverages universal priors to match the complexity of the
source. Our framework can also be applied to general linear inverse problems
where more measurements than in CS might be needed. We provide theoretical
results that support the algorithmic feasibility of universal MAP estimation
using a Markov chain Monte Carlo implementation, which is computationally
challenging. We incorporate some techniques to accelerate the algorithm while
providing comparable and in many cases better reconstruction quality than
existing algorithms. Experimental results show the promise of universality in
CS, particularly for low-complexity sources that do not exhibit standard
sparsity or compressibility.
