Radio Frequency Interference Mitigation based on the ArPLS and SumThreshold Method

TL;DR

This paper presents an automatic RFI mitigation method combining ArPLS for baseline estimation and an adaptive SumThreshold algorithm, improving detection accuracy and efficiency for radio astronomy signals.

Contribution

It introduces a novel combination of ArPLS and adaptive SumThreshold strategies for more accurate and automatic RFI detection in radio telescope data.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods in RFI detection accuracy

Reduces human intervention with adaptive thresholding

Demonstrates effectiveness on FAST telescope data

Abstract

As radio telescopes become sensitive, radio frequency interference (RFI) is more and more serious for interesting signals of radio astronomy. There exist demands for developing an automatic, accurate and efficient RFI mitigation method. Therefore, this work investigated the RFI detection algorithm. Firstly, we introduced an Asymmetrically Reweighted Penalized Least Squares (ArPLS) method to estimate baseline more accurately. After removing the estimated baseline, several novel strategies were proposed based on the SumThreshold algorithm for detecting different types of RFI. The threshold parameter in the SumThreshold can be determined automatically and adaptively. The adaptiveness is essential for reducing human interventions and the online RFI processing pipeline. Applications to FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope) data show that the proposed scheme based on the ArPLS and SumThreshold is superior to some typically available methods for RFI detection with respect to efficiency and performance.