Relaxed concentrated MLE for robust calibration of radio interferometers

Virginie Ollier (1, 2) , Mohammed Nabil El Korso (3) , Remy Boyer (2) , Pascal Larzabal (1) , Marius Pesavento (4)

1 SATIE - Systèmes et Applications des Technologies de l'Information et de l'Energie
2 L2S - Laboratoire des signaux et systèmes
3 LEME - Laboratoire Energétique Mécanique Electromagnétisme
4 Darmstadt University of Technology [Darmstadt]

In this paper, we investigate the calibration of radio interfer-ometers in which Jones matrices are considered to model the interaction between the incident electromagnetic field and the antennas of each station. Specifically, perturbation effects are introduced along the signal path, leading to the conversion of the plane wave into an electric voltage by the receptor. In order to design a robust estimator, the noise is assumed to follow a spherically invariant random process (SIRP). The derived algorithm is based on an iterative relaxed concentrated maximum likelihood estimator (MLE), for which closed-form expressions are obtained for most of the unknown parameters.

Keywords: relaxed concentrated maximum likelihood; SIRP; robustness; Jones matrices; Calibration

Domains: Engineering Sciences [physics]; Signal and Image processing

Virginie Ollier, Mohammed Nabil El Korso, Remy Boyer, Pascal Larzabal, Marius Pesavento. Relaxed concentrated MLE for robust calibration of radio interferometers . 24th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), Aug 2016, Budapest, Hungary. ⟨10.1109/eusipco.2016.7760254⟩. ⟨hal-01335481⟩