Recovery of sparse 1-D signals from the magnitudes of their Fourier transform

The problem of signal recovery from the autocorrelation, or equivalently, the magnitudes of the Fourier transform, is of paramount importance in various fields of engineering. In this work, for one-dimensional signals, we give conditions, which when satisfied, allow unique recovery from the autocorrelation with very high probability. In particular, for sparse signals, we develop two non-iterative recovery algorithms. One of them is based on combinatorial analysis, which we prove can recover signals up to sparsity o(n^1/3) with very high probability, and the other is developed using a convex optimization based framework, which numerical simulations suggest can recover signals upto sparsity o(n^1/2) with very high probability.