RFI-Aware and Low-Cost Maximum Likelihood Imaging for High-Sensitivity Radio Telescopes

Abstract

This paper addresses the challenge of interference mitigation and reduction of computational cost in the context of radio interferometric imaging. We propose a novel maximum-likelihood-based methodology based on the antenna sub-array switching technique, which strikes a refined balance between imaging accuracy and computational efficiency. In addition, we tackle robustness regarding radio interference by modeling the additive noise as t-distributed. Through simulation results, we demonstrate the superiority of the t-distributed noise model over the conventional Gaussian noise model in scenarios involving interferences. We evidence that our proposed switching approach yields similar imaging performances with far fewer visibilities compared to the full array configuration, thus, diminishing the computational complexity.