  Sparse reconstruction approaches using the re-weighted l1-penalty have been
shown, both empirically and theoretically, to provide a significant improvement
in recovering sparse signals in comparison to the l1-relaxation. However,
numerical optimization of such penalties involves solving problems with
l1-norms in the objective many times. Using the direct link of reweighted
l1-penalties to the concave log-regularizer for sparsity, we derive a simple
prox-like algorithm for the log-regularized formulation. The proximal splitting
step of the algorithm has a closed form solution, and we call the algorithm
'log-thresholding' in analogy to soft thresholding for the l1-penalty.
  We establish convergence results, and demonstrate that log-thresholding
provides more accurate sparse reconstructions compared to both soft and hard
thresholding. Furthermore, the approach can be directly extended to
optimization over matrices with penalty for rank (i.e. the nuclear norm penalty
and its re-weigthed version), where we suggest a singular-value
log-thresholding approach.
