Offline and online reconstruction for radio interferometric imaging

Online radio interferometric imaging: assimilating and discarding visibilities on arrival

The emerging generation of radio interferometric (RI) telescopes, such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), will acquire massive volumes of data and transition radio astronomy to a big-data era. The ill-posed inverse problem of imaging the raw visibilities acquired by RI telescopes will become significantly more computationally challenging, particularly in terms of data storage and computational cost. Current RI imaging methods, such as CLEAN, its variants, and compressive sensing approaches (sparse regularisation), have yielded excellent reconstruction fidelity. However, scaling these methods…