A Hierarchical Method for Locating the Interferometric Fringes of Celestial Sources in the Visibility Data

Abstract

Abstract In celestial source detection in Tianlai project, locating interferometric fringe in visibility data accurately will influence downstream tasks drastically, such as physical parameters estimation and weak celestial source exploration. Considering that traditional locating methods are time-consuming and supervised methods require a great quantity of expensive labeled data, in this paper, we firstly investigate characteristic of interferometric fringes in simulation and real scenario respectively, and integrate almost parameter-free unsupervised clustering method and seeding filling or eraser algorithm to propose a hierarchical plug and play method to improve locating accuracy. Then, we apply our method to locate single and multiple sources' interferometric fringes in simulation data. Next, we apply our method in real data taken from Tianlai radio telescope array. Finally, we do comparison with unsupervised methods of state of the art. These results show that our method has robustness in different scenarios and can improve locating measurement accuracy effectively.