In the noise-free case exact reconstruction is guaranteed for any arbitrary set of frequencies as long as the number of measurement data is at least twice the number of distinct frequencies to be recovered. In the presence of noise the stability analysis shows that the perturbation of the noise-space correlation is proportional to the spectral norm of the noise matrix as long as the latter is smaller than the smallest (nonzero) singular value of the noiseless Hankel data matrix. Under the assumption that the true frequencies are separated by at least twice the Rayleigh Length (RL), the stability of the noise-space correlation is proved by means of novel discrete Ingham inequalities which provide bounds on the largest and smallest nonzero singular values of the noiseless Hankel data matrix.
The numerical performance of MUSIC is tested in comparison with other algorithms such as BLO-OMP and SDP (TV-min). While BLO-OMP is the stablest algorithm for frequencies separated above 4 RL, MUSIC becomes the best performing one for frequencies separated between 2 RL and 3 RL. Also, MUSIC is more efficient than other methods. MUSIC truly shines when the frequency separation drops to 1 RL or below when all other methods fail. Indeed, the resolution length of MUSIC decreases to zero as noise decreases to zero as a power law with an exponent smaller than an upper bound established by Donoho.