On the Stability of Fourier Phase Retrieval

Abstract

Phase retrieval is concerned with recovering a function $f$ from the absolute value of its Fourier transform $|\widehat{f}|$. We study the stability properties of this problem in Lebesgue spaces. Our main results shows that $$ \| f-g\|_{L^2(\mathbb{R}^n)} \leq 2\cdot \| |\widehat{f}| - |\widehat{g}| \|_{L^2(\mathbb{R}^n)} + h_f\left( \|f-g\|^{}_{L^p(\mathbb{R}^n)}\right) + J(\widehat{f}, \widehat{g}),$$ where $1 \leq p < 2$, $h_f$ is an explicit nonlinear function depending on the smoothness of $f$ and $J$ is an explicit term capturing the invariance under translations. A noteworthy aspect is that the stability is phrased in terms of $L^p$ for $1 \leq p < 2$ while, usually, $L^p$ cannot be used to control $L^2$, the stability estimate has the flavor of an inverse H\"older inequality. It seems conceivable that the estimate is optimal up to constants.