text: We propose a new algorithm to learn a dictionary for reconstructing and sparsely encoding signals from measurements without phase. Specifically, we consider the task of estimating a two-dimensional image from squared-magnitude measurements of a complex-valued linear transformation of the original image. Several recent phase retrieval algorithms exploit underlying sparsity of the unknown signal in order to improve recovery performance. In this work, we consider such a sparse signal prior in the context of phase retrieval, when the sparsifying dictionary is not known in advance. Our algorithm jointly reconstructs the unknown signal—possibly corrupted by noise—and learns a dictionary such that each patch of the estimated image can be sparsely represented. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our approach can obtain significantly better reconstructions for phase retrieval problems with noise than methods that cannot exploit such “hidden” sparsity. Moreover, on the theoretical side, we provide a convergence result for our method.
  @cite_0: We study the problem of recovering the phase from magnitude measurements; specifically, we wish to reconstruct a complex-valued signal @math about which we have phaseless samples of the form @math , @math (knowledge of the phase of these samples would yield a linear system). This paper develops a nonconvex formulation of the phase retrieval problem as well as a concrete solution algorithm. In a nutshell, this algorithm starts with a careful initialization obtained by means of a spectral method, and then refines this initial estimate by iteratively applying novel update rules, which have low computational complexity, much like in a gradient descent scheme. The main contribution is that this algorithm is shown to rigorously allow the exact retrieval of phase information from a nearly minimal number of random measurements. Indeed, the sequence of successive iterates provably converges to the solution at a geometric rate so that the proposed scheme is efficient both in terms of computational and data resources. In theory, a variation on this scheme leads to a near-linear time algorithm for a physically realizable model based on coded diffraction patterns. We illustrate the effectiveness of our methods with various experiments on image data. Underlying our analysis are insights for the analysis of nonconvex optimization schemes that may have implications for computational problems beyond phase retrieval.
  @cite_31: This paper considers the noisy sparse phase retrieval problem: recovering a sparse signal x ∈ R from noisy quadratic measurements yj = (a ′ jx) 2 + j , j = 1, . . . ,m, with independent sub-exponential noise j . The goals are to understand the effect of the sparsity of x on the estimation precision and to construct a computationally feasible estimator to achieve the optimal rates adaptively. Inspired by the Wirtinger Flow [12] proposed for non-sparse and noiseless phase retrieval, a novel thresholded gradient descent algorithm is proposed and it is shown to adaptively achieve the minimax optimal rates of convergence over a wide range of sparsity levels when the aj ’s are independent standard Gaussian random vectors, provided that the sample size is sufficiently large compared to the sparsity of x.
  @cite_14: We consider the fundamental problem of solving quadratic systems of equations in @math variables, where @math , @math and @math is unknown. We propose a novel method, which starting with an initial guess computed by means of a spectral method, proceeds by minimizing a nonconvex functional as in the Wirtinger flow approach. There are several key distinguishing features, most notably, a distinct objective functional and novel update rules, which operate in an adaptive fashion and drop terms bearing too much influence on the search direction. These careful selection rules provide a tighter initial guess, better descent directions, and thus enhanced practical performance. On the theoretical side, we prove that for certain unstructured models of quadratic systems, our algorithms return the correct solution in linear time, i.e. in time proportional to reading the data @math and @math as soon as the ratio @math between the number of equations and unknowns exceeds a fixed numerical constant. We extend the theory to deal with noisy systems in which we only have @math and prove that our algorithms achieve a statistical accuracy, which is nearly un-improvable. We complement our theoretical study with numerical examples showing that solving random quadratic systems is both computationally and statistically not much harder than solving linear systems of the same size---hence the title of this paper. For instance, we demonstrate empirically that the computational cost of our algorithm is about four times that of solving a least-squares problem of the same size.
summary: A recent method that works in the original variable space is the so-called algorithm @cite_0 . Here, is recast as the optimization problem which is approximately solved by a gradient descent algorithm. Note that in the case of complex variables, the concept of a gradient is not well-defined, but as shown in @cite_0 , a strongly related expression termed the Wirtinger derivative'' can be used instead and indeed reduces to the actual gradient in the real case. For the case of i.i.d. Gaussian random measurements, local convergence with high probability can be proven for the method, and a certain spectral initialization provides sufficiently accurate signal estimates for these results to be applicable. Further variants of the Wirtinger Flow (WF) method that have been investigated are the Truncated WF @cite_14 , which involves improving search directions by a statistically motivated technique to filter out components that bear too much'' influence, and Thresholded WF @cite_31 , which allows for improved reconstruction of signals (i.e., ones with only a few significant components or nonzero elements), in particular when the measurements are corrupted by noise.