PRECL: A new method for interferometry imaging from closure phase

For short-wavelength VLBI observations, it is difficult to measure the phase of the visibility function accurately. The closure phases are reliable measurements under this situation, though it is not sufficient to retrieve all of the phase information. We propose a new method, phase retrieval from closure phase (PRECL). PRECL estimates all the visibility phases only from the closure phases. Combining PRECL with a sparse modeling method we have already proposed, the imaging process of VLBI does not rely on a dirty image or self-calibration. The proposed method is tested numerically and the results are promising.