| 4th of March 2015 |
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| ATNF Colloquium |
| Spatial RFI Mitigation & Radio Astronomy |
| by Greg Hellbourg (CASS) |
| Abstract.Radio-Frequency Interference
(RFI) is a serious and challenging issue for radio astronomy due to increasing
spectrum occupancy. Current approaches for mitigating interference
contributions to astronomical observations mostly consist of detecting and
excising corrupted data in the time and/or frequency domains. Although this
process is easy to implement, the loss of data involved can be significant.
The development of sensor arrays in the last decades naturally gave rise to new trends in signal processing, including spatial RFI mitigation. This scheme is based on the separation between the source-of-interest and the interferer in the spatial domain. The main advantage of such an approach is, in theory at least, the ability to recover uncorrupted time-frequency data after processing. This talk will briefly introduce the underlying concepts of spatial - or multivariate - signal processing, and discuss its applicability to radio astronomy. After describing the constitution of an adaptive spatial RFI mitigation algorithm, an example of a real-time implementation will be presented. |