Why simple shrinkage is still relevant for redundant representations?

Shrinkage is a well known and appealing denoising technique, introduced originally by Donoho and Johnstone in 1994. The use of shrinkage for denoising is known to be optimal for Gaussian white noise, provided that the sparsity on the signal's representation is enforced using a unitary transform. Still, shrinkage is also practiced with nonunitary, and even redundant representations, typically leading to very satisfactory results. In this correspondence we shed some light on this behavior. The main argument in this work is that such simple shrinkage could be interpreted as the first iteration of an algorithm that solves the basis pursuit denoising (BPDN) problem. While the desired solution of BPDN is hard to obtain in general, we develop a simple iterative procedure for the BPDN minimization that amounts to stepwise shrinkage. We demonstrate how the simple shrinkage emerges as the first iteration of this novel algorithm. Furthermore, we show how shrinkage can be iterated, turning into an effective algorithm that minimizes the BPDN via simple shrinkage steps, in order to further strengthen the denoising effect.