  In audio processing applications, phase retrieval (PR) is often performed
from the magnitude of short-time Fourier transform (STFT) coefficients.
Although PR performance has been observed to depend on the considered STFT
parameters and audio data, the extent of this dependence has not been
systematically evaluated yet. To address this, we studied the performance of
three PR algorithms for various types of audio content and various STFT
parameters such as redundancy, time-frequency ratio, and the type of window.
The quality of PR was studied in terms of objective difference grade and
signal-to-noise ratio of the STFT magnitude, to provide auditory- and
signal-based quality assessments. Our results show that PR quality improved
with increasing redundancy, with a strong relevance of the time-frequency
ratio. The effect of the audio content was smaller but still observable. The
effect of the window was only significant for one of the PR algorithms.
Interestingly, for a good PR quality, each of the three algorithms required a
different set of parameters, demonstrating the relevance of individual
parameter sets for a fair comparison across PR algorithms. Based on these
results, we developed guidelines for optimizing STFT parameters for a given
application.
