Issue |
A&A
Volume 674, June 2023
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A161 | |
Number of page(s) | 15 | |
Section | Astronomical instrumentation | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202245778 | |
Published online | 20 June 2023 |
Challenging interferometric imaging: Machine learning-based source localization from uv-plane observations
1
Department of Computer Science, University of Geneva,
7 route de Drize,
1227
Carouge, Switzerland
e-mail: svolos@unige.ch
2
Observatoire de Genève, Université de Genève,
51 Chemin Pegasi,
1290
Versoix, Switzerland
Received:
23
December
2022
Accepted:
12
April
2023
Context. Rising interest in radio astronomy and upcoming projects in the field is expected to produce petabytes of data per day, questioning the applicability of traditional radio astronomy data analysis approaches under the new large-scale conditions. This requires new, intelligent, fast, and efficient methods that potentially involve less input from the domain expert.
Aims. In our work, we examine, for the first time, the possibility of fast and efficient source localization directly from the uv-observations, omitting the recovering of the dirty or clean images.
Methods. We propose a deep neural network-based framework that takes as its input a low-dimensional vector of sampled uv-data and outputs source positions on the sky. We investigated a representation of the complex-valued input uv-data via the real and imaginary and the magnitude and phase components. We provided a comparison of the efficiency of the proposed framework with the traditional source localization pipeline based on the state-of-the-art Python Blob Detection and Source Finder (PyBDSF) method. The investigation was performed on a data set of 9164 sky models simulated using the Common Astronomy Software Applications (CASA) tool for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) Cycle 5.3 antenna configuration.
Results. We investigated two scenarios: (i) noise-free as an ideal case and (ii) sky simulations including noise representative of typical extra-galactic millimeter observations. In the noise-free case, the proposed localization framework demonstrates the same high performance as the state-of-the-art PyBDSF method. For noisy data, however, our new method demonstrates significantly better performance, achieving a completeness level that is three times higher for sources with uniform signal-to-noise ratios (S/N) between 1 and 10, and a high increase in completeness in the low S/N regime. Furthermore, the execution time of the proposed framework is significantly reduced (by factors ~30) as compared to traditional methods that include image reconstructions from the uv-plane and subsequent source detections.
Conclusions. The proposed framework for obtaining fast and efficient source localization directly from uv-plane observations shows very encouraging results, which could open new horizons for interferometric imaging with existing and future facilities.
Key words: techniques: interferometric / methods: data analysis / submillimeter: general / radio continuum: general
© The Authors 2023
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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