Point and beam-sparse radio astronomical source recovery using non-negative least squares

Abstract

A simple and novel algorithm for source recovery based on array data measurements in radio astronomy is proposed. Considering that a radioastronomical image is composed of both point sources and extended emissions, prior information on the images, namely non-negativity and substantial black background are taken into account to choose source representation basis functions. Dirac delta functions are chosen to represent point sources and a Gaussian function approximated from the main beam of the antenna array is selected to capture the extended emissions. We apply the non-negative least squares (NNLS) algorithm to estimate the basis coefficients. It is shown that the sparsity promoted by the NNLS algorithm based on the chosen basis functions results in a super-resolution (finer resolution than prescribed by the main beam of the antenna array pattern) estimate for the point sources and smooth recovery for the extended emissions.