Identification of Radio Frequency Interference Using Multi-scale TransUNet

Radio observation is a method for conducting astronomical observations using radio waves. A common challenge in radio observations is Radio Frequency Interference (RFI), which refers to the unintentional or intentional interference of radio signals from other wireless sources within the radio frequency band. Such interference contaminates the astronomical signals received by radio telescopes, significantly affecting time–frequency domain astronomical observations and research. Consequently, identifying RFI is crucial. In this paper, we employ a deep learning approach to detect RFI present in observation data and propose an improved network structure based on TransUNet. This network leverages the principles of a multi-scale convolutional attention mechanism. It introduces an auxiliary branch to extract high-dimensional image information and an enhanced coordinate attention mechanism for feature map extraction, enabling more comprehensive and accurate identification of RFI in time–frequency images. We introduce a novel architecture named the Multi-Scale TransUNet Network, abbreviated as MS-TransUNet. We utilized observation data from the 40 m radio telescope at the Yunnan Observatory as a data set for training, validating, and testing the network. Compared with previous deep learning networks (U-Net, RFI-Net, R-Net, DSC, EMSCA-UNet), the recall rate and f2 score have been significantly improved. Specifically, the recall rate is improved by at least 2.99%, and the f2 score is improved by at least 2.46%. Experiments demonstrate that this network is exceptional in identifying RFI more comprehensively while ensuring high precision.