  Compressed sensing is triggering a major evolution in signal acquisition. It
consists in sampling a sparse signal at low rate and later using computational
power for its exact reconstruction, so that only the necessary information is
measured. Currently used reconstruction techniques are, however, limited to
acquisition rates larger than the true density of the signal. We design a new
procedure which is able to reconstruct exactly the signal with a number of
measurements that approaches the theoretical limit in the limit of large
systems. It is based on the joint use of three essential ingredients: a
probabilistic approach to signal reconstruction, a message-passing algorithm
adapted from belief propagation, and a careful design of the measurement matrix
inspired from the theory of crystal nucleation. The performance of this new
algorithm is analyzed by statistical physics methods. The obtained improvement
is confirmed by numerical studies of several cases.
