  Commonly employed reconstruction algorithms in compressed sensing (CS) use
the $L_2$ norm as the metric for the residual error. However, it is well-known
that least squares (LS) based estimators are highly sensitive to outliers
present in the measurement vector leading to a poor performance when the noise
no longer follows the Gaussian assumption but, instead, is better characterized
by heavier-than-Gaussian tailed distributions. In this paper, we propose a
robust iterative hard Thresholding (IHT) algorithm for reconstructing sparse
signals in the presence of impulsive noise. To address this problem, we use a
Lorentzian cost function instead of the $L_2$ cost function employed by the
traditional IHT algorithm. We also modify the algorithm to incorporate prior
signal information in the recovery process. Specifically, we study the case of
CS with partially known support. The proposed algorithm is a fast method with
computational load comparable to the LS based IHT, whilst having the advantage
of robustness against heavy-tailed impulsive noise. Sufficient conditions for
stability are studied and a reconstruction error bound is derived. We also
derive sufficient conditions for stable sparse signal recovery with partially
known support. Theoretical analysis shows that including prior support
information relaxes the conditions for successful reconstruction. Simulation
results demonstrate that the Lorentzian-based IHT algorithm significantly
outperform commonly employed sparse reconstruction techniques in impulsive
environments, while providing comparable performance in less demanding,
light-tailed environments. Numerical results also demonstrate that the
partially known support inclusion improves the performance of the proposed
algorithm, thereby requiring fewer samples to yield an approximate
reconstruction.
