  The past several years have witnessed a surge of research investigating
various aspects of sparse representations and compressed sensing. Most of this
work has focused on the finite-dimensional setting in which the goal is to
decompose a finite-length vector into a given finite dictionary. Underlying
many of these results is the conceptual notion of an uncertainty principle: a
signal cannot be sparsely represented in two different bases. Here, we extend
these ideas and results to the analog, infinite-dimensional setting by
considering signals that lie in a finitely-generated shift-invariant (SI)
space. This class of signals is rich enough to include many interesting special
cases such as multiband signals and splines. By adapting the notion of
coherence defined for finite dictionaries to infinite SI representations, we
develop an uncertainty principle similar in spirit to its finite counterpart.
We demonstrate tightness of our bound by considering a bandlimited lowpass
train that achieves the uncertainty principle. Building upon these results and
similar work in the finite setting, we show how to find a sparse decomposition
in an overcomplete dictionary by solving a convex optimization problem. The
distinguishing feature of our approach is the fact that even though the problem
is defined over an infinite domain with infinitely many variables and
constraints, under certain conditions on the dictionary spectrum our algorithm
can find the sparsest representation by solving a finite-dimensional problem.
