Given a set of integers, one can easily construct the set of their pairwise
distances. We consider the inverse problem: given a set of pairwise distances,
find the integer set which realizes the pairwise distance set. This problem
arises in a lot of fields in engineering and applied physics, and has
confounded researchers for over 60 years. It is one of the few fundamental
problems that are neither known to be NP-hard nor solvable by polynomial-time
algorithms. Whether unique recovery is possible also remains an open question.
In many practical applications where this problem occurs, the integer set is
naturally sparse (i.e., the integers are sufficiently spaced), a property which
has not been explored. In this work, we exploit the sparse nature of the
integer set and develop a polynomial-time algorithm which provably recovers the
set of integers (up to linear shift and reversal) from the set of their
pairwise distances with arbitrarily high probability if the sparsity is
O(n^{1/2-\eps}). Numerical simulations verify the effectiveness of the
proposed algorithm.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, submitted to ICASSP 201
