PolarRec: Radio Interferometric Data Reconstruction with Polar Coordinate Representation
Ruoqi Wang, Zhuoyang Chen, Jiayi Zhu, Qiong Luo, Feng Wang

TL;DR
PolarRec introduces a novel polar coordinate-based transformer approach for radio interferometric data reconstruction, improving image quality and computational efficiency by better capturing visibility data in radio astronomy.
Contribution
It proposes a polar coordinate representation and a group-based encoding scheme within a transformer framework for more complete and efficient visibility data reconstruction.
Findings
Enhanced reconstruction of visibility data with fewer artifacts.
Significant reduction in computational cost during data encoding.
Improved image quality in radio astronomy observations.
Abstract
In radio astronomy, visibility data, which are measurements of wave signals from radio telescopes, are transformed into images for observation of distant celestial objects. However, these resultant images usually contain both real sources and artifacts, due to signal sparsity and other factors. One way to obtain cleaner images is to reconstruct samples into dense forms before imaging. Unfortunately, existing reconstruction methods often miss some components of visibility in frequency domain, so blurred object edges and persistent artifacts remain in the images. Furthermore, the computation overhead is high on irregular visibility samples due to the data skew. To address these problems, we propose PolarRec, a transformer-encoder-conditioned reconstruction pipeline with visibility samples converted into the polar coordinate representation. This representation matches the way in which…
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Taxonomy
TopicsRadio Astronomy Observations and Technology · Optical measurement and interference techniques · Antenna Design and Optimization
MethodsMulti-Head Attention · Attention Is All You Need · Linear Layer · Softmax · Dense Connections · Layer Normalization · Dropout · Byte Pair Encoding · Adam · Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer
