Radio telescopes produce incredibly faint pulsar signals. In general, there are two major challenges in pulsar signal processing: one is the mitigation of radio-frequency interference (RFI), and the other is information loss due to the preprocessing and mitigation itself. As a result, advancements in the RFI reduction approach are important for future research on astronomical measures such as pulsar timing. Using pulsar data collected by the NanShan 26-m Radio Telescope (NSRT) from 2011 to 2014, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory (XAO) proposed a novel method called CS-Pulsar, which performs compressed sensing (CS) on time-frequency signals to achieve RFI mitigation and signal restoration simultaneously.
To facilitate the optimization, the wavelet transform and discrete cosine transform were used as sparse boosting terms. The sensing mechanism performed better in signal restoration for preprocessed channels and had a favorable effect in suppressing pulse RFI, according to the results. There were no systematic biases or underestimated uncertainty in a pulsar timing application. This strategy can increase timing accuracy to some extent by lowering timing residuals and anticipated errors. The findings were reported in The Astrophysical Journal.
Journal Information: Hao Shan et al, Compressed Sensing Based RFI Mitigation and Restoration for Pulsar Signals, The Astrophysical Journal (2022). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac8003