Radio Transient Detection in Radio Astronomical Arrays

Celestial transient radio sources have attracted considerable scientific interest recently, but their investigation is hampered by the fact that they cannot be effectively detected by commonly used radio astronomy imaging techniques. One significant obstacle to observing radio transients is intermittent terrestrial radio frequency interference, which can appear as a transient signal. In this work we present bgeneralized likelihood ratio test detectors for several transient signal and noise models. The two transient signal models considered are of far field sources, such as astronomical sources, whose steering vector is known to be in the array manifold; and of near field sources, such as terrestrial interferences, for which no prior knowledge about the steering vector is assumed. The detectors designed for near field sources have the desirable property of a constant false alarm rate. Asymptotic performance of those detectors is provided. Computer simulation results suggest that the proposed detectors outperform the detector used by the low frequency array (LOFAR) radio telescope.

* M.Sc. research supervised by Prof. Amir Leshem