Information Theoretic Limits for Phase Retrieval with Subsampled Haar Sensing Matrices

We study information theoretic limits of recovering an unknown $n$ dimensional, complex signal vector $\mathbf{x}_\star$ with unit norm from $m$ magnitude-only measurements of the form $y_i = |(\mathbf{A} \mathbf{x}_\star)_i|^2, \; i = 1,2 \dots , m$, where $\mathbf{A}$ is the sensing matrix. This is known as the Phase Retrieval problem and models practical imaging systems where measuring the phase of the observations is difficult. Since in a number of applications, the sensing matrix has orthogonal columns, we model the sensing matrix as a subsampled Haar matrix formed by picking $n$ columns of a uniformly random $m \times m$ unitary matrix. We study this problem in the high dimensional asymptotic regime, where $m,n \rightarrow \infty$, while $m/n \rightarrow \delta$ with $\delta$ being a fixed number, and show that if $m < (2-o_n(1))\cdot n$, then any estimator is asymptotically orthogonal to the true signal vector $\mathbf{x}_\star$. This lower bound is sharp since when $m > (2+o_n(1)) \cdot n$, estimators that achieve a non trivial asymptotic correlation with the signal vector are known from previous works.