  Compressed sensing is a developing field aiming at reconstruction of sparse
signals acquired in reduced dimensions, which make the recovery process
under-determined. The required solution is the one with minimum $\ell_0$ norm
due to sparsity, however it is not practical to solve the $\ell_0$ minimization
problem. Commonly used techniques include $\ell_1$ minimization, such as Basis
Pursuit (BP) and greedy pursuit algorithms such as Orthogonal Matching Pursuit
(OMP) and Subspace Pursuit (SP). This manuscript proposes a novel semi-greedy
recovery approach, namely A* Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (A*OMP). A*OMP
performs A* search to look for the sparsest solution on a tree whose paths grow
similar to the Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) algorithm. Paths on the tree
are evaluated according to a cost function, which should compensate for
different path lengths. For this purpose, three different auxiliary structures
are defined, including novel dynamic ones. A*OMP also incorporates pruning
techniques which enable practical applications of the algorithm. Moreover, the
adjustable search parameters provide means for a complexity-accuracy trade-off.
We demonstrate the reconstruction ability of the proposed scheme on both
synthetically generated data and images using Gaussian and Bernoulli
observation matrices, where A*OMP yields less reconstruction error and higher
exact recovery frequency than BP, OMP and SP. Results also indicate that novel
dynamic cost functions provide improved results as compared to a conventional
choice.
