Interference Mitigation via NMF for Radio Astronomy Applications: A Feasibility Study

This work assesses the feasibility of using nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) for radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation in radio astronomy applications. Two NMF-based mitigation approaches are proposed, one using RFI frequency information extracted from the received signals and the other using an RFI template. The suitability and efficacy of these approaches are evaluated by targeting automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) RFI using data collected from the Parkes radio telescope in Australia. Results show that the proposed approaches can mitigate the RFI with minimal degradation to the underlying observation of a double pulsar, and without discarding any received data, indicating the applicability of NMF-based approaches as potential RFI mitigation tools in radio astronomy applications.