Multi-window STFT phase retrieval: lattice uniqueness

Abstract

Short-time Fourier transform (STFT) phase retrieval refers to the reconstruction of a function $f$ from its spectrogram, i.e., the magnitudes of its short-time Fourier transform $V_gf$ with window function $g$. While it is known that for appropriate windows, any function $f \in L^2(\mathbb{R})$ can be reconstructed from the full spectrogram $|V_g f(\mathbb{R}^2)|$, in practical scenarios, the reconstruction must be achieved from discrete samples, typically taken on a lattice. It turns out that the sampled problem becomes much more subtle: recent results have demonstrated that uniqueness via lattice-sampling is unachievable, irrespective of the choice of the window function or the lattice density. In the present paper, we initiate the study of multi-window STFT phase retrieval as a way to effectively bypass the discretization barriers encountered in the single-window case. By establishing a link between multi-window Gabor systems, sampling in Fock space, and phase retrieval for finite frames, we derive conditions under which square-integrable functions can be uniquely recovered from spectrogram samples on a lattice. Specifically, we provide conditions on window functions $g_1, \dots, g_4 \in L^2(\mathbb{R})$, such that every $f \in L^2(\mathbb{R})$ is determined up to a global phase from $$\left(|V_{g_1}f(A\mathbb{Z}^2)|, \, \dots, \, |V_{g_4}f(A\mathbb{Z}^2)| \right)$$ whenever $A \in \mathrm{GL}_2(\mathbb{R})$ satisfies the density condition $|\det A|^{-1} \geq 4$. For real-valued functions, a density of $|\det A|^{-1} \geq 2$ is sufficient. Corresponding results for irregular sampling are also shown.