Almost lossless analog compression without phase information

We propose an information-theoretic framework for phase retrieval. Specifically, we consider the problem of recovering an unknown vector x ∈ ℝⁿ up to an overall sign factor from m = ⌊Rn⌋ phaseless measurements with compression rate R and derive a general achievability bound for R. Surprisingly, it turns out that this bound on the compression rate is the same as the one for almost lossless analog compression obtained by Wu and Verdú (2010): Phaseless linear measurements are “as good” as linear measurements with full phase information in the sense that ignoring the sign of m measurements only leaves us with an ambiguity with respect to an overall sign factor of x.