A Subspace Algorithm to Mitigate Energy Unknown RFI for Synthetic Aperture Interferometric Radiometer

Radio frequency interferences (RFIs) are present in the data collected by a synthetic aperture interferometric radiometer (SAIR), and these would seriously affect the retrieval of brightness temperature (BT), if not properly handled. Due to the truncated Fourier characteristic, RFIs create ripples that extend over a large set of pixels of the whole image, which is difficult to cancel out their impacts at the BT domain. The current strategy relies on removing the unwanted sources at the visibility level (Fourier domain) with a set of synthetic visibilities of the RFI sources for a given snapshot. However, a major problem is that, as unauthorized emissions, the energies of RFIs are typically unknown and the estimation to the sources’ temperature could be inaccurate without credible prior information. In this article, a subspace algorithm is proposed to handle the RFI mitigation problem by exploiting RFI’s point-source characteristic, where the visibilities related to the RFIs are excluded from that of the BT scene through an orthogonal design without the need of knowing the sources’ power. Both the numerical simulations and the proof-of-concept experiment validate the theoretical correctness and the practical effectiveness of our proposed method.