CLEAN algorithm implementation comparisons between popular software packages
11-06, 08:30– (US/Arizona), Posters

The CLEAN algorithm, first published by Högbom (1974) and its later variants such as Multiscale CLEAN (msCLEAN) by Cornwell (2008), has been the most popular tool for deconvolution in interferometric imaging used by aperture synthesis radio telescopes. CLEAN effectively removes the telescopes point spread function from the observed images. We have compared source fluxes produced by different implementations of msCLEAN (WSCLEAN, CASA) with a prototype implementation of msCLEAN for the SKA on two datasets. The first is a simulation of multiple point sources of known intensity, where none of the software packages detected all the simulated point sources to within 1.0% of the simulated values. The second is of supernova remnant 3C 391 taken by the Very Large Array (VLA), where none of the software packages produced images which agreed to within 1.0% of each other.

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Daniel Wright was born in Wakefield, United Kingdom in 1982. He received the M.Eng degree in electronic engineering from the University of York, York, United Kingdom, in 2013. He then received the Ph.D degree in electronic engineering from the University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom in 2021. From 2014 to 2015 he was with the RAL Space division of Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot, United Kingdom, focusing on the electronic design of spacecraft instrumentation. He is currently with the Oxford e-Research Center, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, working on the deign of software for the Science Data Processor of the Square Kilometer Array. His research interests include radio astronomy algorithms and GPU acceleration.