  In this paper, a fast algorithm for overcomplete sparse decomposition, called
SL0, is proposed. The algorithm is essentially a method for obtaining sparse
solutions of underdetermined systems of linear equations, and its applications
include underdetermined Sparse Component Analysis (SCA), atomic decomposition
on overcomplete dictionaries, compressed sensing, and decoding real field
codes. Contrary to previous methods, which usually solve this problem by
minimizing the L1 norm using Linear Programming (LP) techniques, our algorithm
tries to directly minimize the L0 norm. It is experimentally shown that the
proposed algorithm is about two to three orders of magnitude faster than the
state-of-the-art interior-point LP solvers, while providing the same (or
better) accuracy.
