  The orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) is an algorithm to solve sparse
approximation problems. Sufficient conditions for exact recovery are known with
and without noise. In this paper we investigate the applicability of the OMP
for the solution of ill-posed inverse problems in general and in particular for
two deconvolution examples from mass spectrometry and digital holography
respectively.
  In sparse approximation problems one often has to deal with the problem of
redundancy of a dictionary, i.e. the atoms are not linearly independent.
However, one expects them to be approximatively orthogonal and this is
quantified by the so-called incoherence. This idea cannot be transfered to
ill-posed inverse problems since here the atoms are typically far from
orthogonal: The ill-posedness of the operator causes that the correlation of
two distinct atoms probably gets huge, i.e. that two atoms can look much alike.
Therefore one needs conditions which take the structure of the problem into
account and work without the concept of coherence. In this paper we develop
results for exact recovery of the support of noisy signals. In the two examples
in mass spectrometry and digital holography we show that our results lead to
practically relevant estimates such that one may check a priori if the
experimental setup guarantees exact deconvolution with OMP. Especially in the
example from digital holography our analysis may be regarded as a first step to
calculate the resolution power of droplet holography.
