No Arabic abstract
Imaging by aperture synthesis from interferometric data is a well-known, but is a strong ill-posed inverse problem. Strong and faint radio sources can be imaged unambiguously using time and frequency integration to gather more Fourier samples of the sky. However, these imagers assumes a steady sky and the complexity of the problem increases when transients radio sources are also present in the data. Hopefully, in the context of transient imaging, the spatial and temporal information are separable which enable extension of an imager fit for a steady sky. We introduce independent spatial and temporal wavelet dictionaries to sparsely represent the transient in both spatial domain and temporal domain. These dictionaries intervenes in a new reconstruction method developed in the Compressed Sensing (CS) framework and using a primal-dual splitting algorithm. According to the preliminary tests in different noise regimes, this new Time-agile (or 2D-1D) method seems to be efficient in detecting and reconstructing the transients temporal dependence.
We propose an algorithm for the reconstruction of the signal induced by cosmic strings in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), from radio-interferometric data at arcminute resolution. Radio interferometry provides incomplete and noisy Fourier measurements of the string signal, which exhibits sparse or compressible magnitude of the gradient due to the Kaiser-Stebbins (KS) effect. In this context the versatile framework of compressed sensing naturally applies for solving the corresponding inverse problem. Our algorithm notably takes advantage of a model of the prior statistical distribution of the signal fitted on the basis of realistic simulations. Enhanced performance relative to the standard CLEAN algorithm is demonstrated by simulated observations under noise conditions including primary and secondary CMB anisotropies.
Many interesting problems in fields ranging from telecommunications to computational biology can be formalized in terms of large underdetermined systems of linear equations with additional constraints or regularizers. One of the most studied ones, the Compressed Sensing problem (CS), consists in finding the solution with the smallest number of non-zero components of a given system of linear equations $boldsymbol y = mathbf{F} boldsymbol{w}$ for known measurement vector $boldsymbol{y}$ and sensing matrix $mathbf{F}$. Here, we will address the compressed sensing problem within a Bayesian inference framework where the sparsity constraint is remapped into a singular prior distribution (called Spike-and-Slab or Bernoulli-Gauss). Solution to the problem is attempted through the computation of marginal distributions via Expectation Propagation (EP), an iterative computational scheme originally developed in Statistical Physics. We will show that this strategy is comparatively more accurate than the alternatives in solving instances of CS generated from statistically correlated measurement matrices. For computational strategies based on the Bayesian framework such as variants of Belief Propagation, this is to be expected, as they implicitly rely on the hypothesis of statistical independence among the entries of the sensing matrix. Perhaps surprisingly, the method outperforms uniformly also all the other state-of-the-art methods in our tests.
While the radio detection of cosmic rays has advanced to a standard method in astroparticle physics, the radio detection of neutrinos is just about to start its full bloom. The successes of pilot-arrays have to be accompanied by the development of modern and flexible software tools to ensure rapid progress in reconstruction algorithms and data processing. We present NuRadioReco as such a modern Python-based data analysis tool. It includes a suitable data-structure, a database-implementation of a time-dependent detector, modern browser-based data visualization tools, and fully separated analysis modules. We describe the framework and examples, as well as new reconstruction algorithms to obtain the full three-dimensional electric field from distributed antennas which is needed for high-precision energy reconstruction of particle showers.
Compressed sensing fluorescence microscopy (CS-FM) proposes a scheme whereby less measurements are collected during sensing and reconstruction is performed to recover the image. Much work has gone into optimizing the sensing and reconstruction portions separately. We propose a method of jointly optimizing both sensing and reconstruction end-to-end under a total measurement constraint, enabling learning of the optimal sensing scheme concurrently with the parameters of a neural network-based reconstruction network. We train our model on a rich dataset of confocal, two-photon, and wide-field microscopy images comprising of a variety of biological samples. We show that our method outperforms several baseline sensing schemes and a regularized regression reconstruction algorithm.
We demonstrate a new technique for detecting radio transients based on interferometric closure quantities. The technique uses the bispectrum, the product of visibilities around a closed-loop of baselines of an interferometer. The bispectrum is calibration independent, resistant to interference, and computationally efficient, so it can be built into correlators for real-time transient detection. Our technique could find celestial transients anywhere in the field of view and localize them to arcsecond precision. At the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), such a system would have a high survey speed and a 5-sigma sensitivity of 38 mJy on 10 ms timescales with 1 GHz of bandwidth. The ability to localize dispersed millisecond pulses to arcsecond precision in large volumes of interferometer data has several unique science applications. Localizing individual pulses from Galactic pulsars will help find X-ray counterparts that define their physical properties, while finding host galaxies of extragalactic transients will measure the electron density of the intergalactic medium with a single dispersed pulse. Exoplanets and active stars have distinct millisecond variability that can be used to identify them and probe their magnetospheres. We use millisecond time scale visibilities from the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) and VLA to show that the bispectrum can detect dispersed pulses and reject local interference. The computational and data efficiency of the bispectrum will help find transients on a range of time scales with next-generation radio interferometers.