Swarm intelligence for full Stokes dynamic imaging reconstruction of interferometric data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel swarm intelligence algorithm for reconstructing high-resolution, dynamic, and polarimetric images from sparse interferometric data, overcoming limitations of existing grid-based optimization methods.

Contribution

The work presents a grid-free, multiobjective particle swarm optimization algorithm for interferometric imaging, capable of handling static, dynamic, and polarimetric data simultaneously.

Findings

Successfully reconstructs static and dynamic polarimetric images from synthetic data.

Avoids parameter surveys and grid limitations of previous methods.

Effective in sparse and corrupted data scenarios.

Abstract

In very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) the combination of multiple antennas permits the synthesis of a virtual telescope with a larger diameter and consequently higher resolution than the individual antennae. Yet, due to the sparse nature of the array, recovering an image from the observed data is a challenging ill-posed inverse problem. The VLBI community is interested in not only recovering an image in total intensity from interferometric data, but also to obtain results in the polarimetric and the temporal domain. Only a few algorithms are able to work in all these domains simultaneously. In particular, the algorithms based on optimization that consider various penalty terms specific to static total intensity imaging, time-variability and polarimetry are restricted to grids the domain of the objective function. In this work we present a novel algorithm, multiobjective particle swarm optimization, that is able to recover the optimal weights without any space-gridding, and to obtain the marginal contribution of each the playing terms. To this end, we utilize multiobjective optimization together with particle swarm metaheuristics. We let the swarm of weights to converge together to the best position. We evaluate our algorithm with representative synthetic data sets focused on the instrumental configuration of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration and its planned successors. We successfully recover the polarimetric, static and time-dynamic signature of the ground truth movie, even with relative sparsity, and a set of realistic data corruptions. This is a novel, fast, weighting space gridding-free algorithm that successfully recovers static and dynamic polarimetric reconstructions. Compared to Regularized Maximum Likelihood methods, it avoids the need for parameter surveys, and it is not limited to the number of pixels such as recently proposed multiobjective imaging algorithms.