Stability of unique Fourier-transform phase reconstruction

Abstract

The problem of Fourier-transform phase reconstruction from the Fourier-transform magnitude of multidimensional discrete signals is considered. It is well known that, if a discrete finite-extent n-dimensional signal (n ≥ 2) has an irreducible z transform, then the signal is uniquely determined from the magnitude of its Fourier transform. It is also known that this irreducibility condition holds for all multidimensional signals except for a set of signals that has measure zero. We show that this uniqueness condition is stable in the sense that it is not sensitive to noise. Specifically, it is proved that the set of signals whose z transform is reducible is contained in the zero set of a certain multidimensional polynomial. Several important conclusions can be drawn from this characterization, and, in particular, the zero-measure property is obtained as a simple byproduct.