A Deterministic Theory for Exact Non-Convex Phase Retrieval

In this paper, we analyze the non-convex framework of Wirtinger Flow (WF) for phase retrieval and identify a novel sufficient condition for universal exact recovery through the lens of low rank matrix recovery theory. Via a perspective in the lifted domain, we show that the convergence of the WF iterates to a true solution is attained geometrically under a single condition on the lifted forward model. As a result, a deterministic relationship between the accuracy of spectral initialization and the validity of {the regularity condition} is derived. In particular, we determine that a certain concentration property on the spectral matrix must hold uniformly with a sufficiently tight constant. This culminates into a sufficient condition that is equivalent to a restricted isometry-type property over rank-1, positive semi-definite matrices, and amounts to a less stringent requirement on the lifted forward model than those of prominent low-rank-matrix-recovery methods in the literature. We characterize the performance limits of our framework in terms of the tightness of the concentration property via novel bounds on the convergence rate and on the signal-to-noise ratio such that the theoretical guarantees are valid using the spectral initialization at the proper sample complexity.Comment: In Revision for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Phase retrieval with random Gaussian sensing vectors by alternating projections

We consider a phase retrieval problem, where we want to reconstruct a $n$-dimensional vector from its phaseless scalar products with $m$ sensing vectors. We assume the sensing vectors to be independently sampled from complex normal distributions. We propose to solve this problem with the classical non-convex method of alternating projections. We show that, when $m\geq Cn$ for $C$ large enough, alternating projections succeed with high probability, provided that they are carefully initialized. We also show that there is a regime in which the stagnation points of the alternating projections method disappear, and the initialization procedure becomes useless. However, in this regime, $m$ has to be of the order of $n^2$. Finally, we conjecture from our numerical experiments that, in the regime $m=O(n)$, there are stagnation points, but the size of their attraction basin is small if $m/n$ is large enough, so alternating projections can succeed with probability close to $1$ even with no special initialization