Valchava workshop, day five

Today was radio-interferometry day. Rix and I explained our issues with CLEAN, and we discussed with the computer vision types. Fergus described CLEAN as a conservative greedy algorithm, which is very appropriate. In the end we had some good ideas about how to attack the problem, with agreement from everyone. The only point of concern was between those (Harmeling representing) who thought we might be able to proceed without strong priors and those (Fergus and Schuler representing) who thought that strong priors would be necessary to deal with the spatial frequencies at which there is no u-v coverage. At the end of the day I was assigned the task of writing down what we learned and agreed upon. I started on that.

One interesting thing about CLEAN is that it averages visibilities on a grid in u-v so that it can use the fast fourier transform. This is a great idea, but makes forward modeling harder. We are hoping we can stay fast without this trick. In our vision (codenamed NAELC) we never transform in that direction anyway.