Convergence properties of gradient methods for blind ptychography

Abstract: We consider blind ptychography, an imaging technique which aims to reconstruct an object of interest from a set of its diffraction patterns, each obtained by a local illumination. As the distribution of the light within the illuminated region, called the window, is unknown, it also has to be estimated as well. For the recovery, we consider gradient and stochastic gradient descent methods for the minimization of amplitude-base squared loss. In particular, this includes extended Ptychographic Iterative Engine as a special case of stochastic gradient descent. We show that all methods converge to a critical point at a sublinear rate with a proper choice of step sizes. We also discuss possibilities for larger step sizes.