  A general mathematical framework and recovery algorithm is presented for the
holographic phase retrieval problem. In this problem, which arises in
holographic coherent diffraction imaging, a "reference" portion of the signal
to be recovered via phase retrieval is a priori known from experimental design.
A generic formula is also derived for the expected recovery error when the
measurement data is corrupted by Poisson shot noise. This facilitates an
optimization perspective towards reference design and analysis. We employ this
optimization perspective towards quantifying the performance of various
reference choices.
