Uniqueness of STFT phase retrieval for bandlimited functions

Abstract

We consider the problem of phase retrieval from magnitudes of short-time Fourier transform (STFT) measurements. It is well-known that signals are uniquely determined (up to global phase) by their STFT magnitude when the underlying window has an ambiguity function that is nowhere vanishing. It is less clear, however, what can be said in terms of unique phase-retrievability when the ambiguity function of the underlying window vanishes on some of the time-frequency plane. In this note, we demonstrate that by considering signals in Paley–Wiener spaces, it is possible to prove new uniqueness results for STFT phase retrieval. Among those, we establish a first uniqueness theorem for STFT phase retrieval from magnitude-only samples for real-valued signals.