A Coastal RFI Mitigation Method for Synthetic Aperture Interferometric Radiometer.

This letter pays attention to the mitigation of the radio frequency interference (RFI) sources located at coastal regions for synthetic aperture interferometric radiometer (SAIR). To remove an RFI at the visibility level, it will be necessary to estimate the brightness temperature (BT) of the point source, which is currently done by computing the median of the surrounded pixels to get the background BT and subtracting it from the original contaminated BT. However, this strategy is based on the assumption that the background BT distribution around the RFI is flat, and this is not reasonable for those RFIs from coastal cities and could result in estimation deviation. A robust RFI mitigation method is proposed without introducing complex computing. Instead of focusing only on the local area, the basic idea of our method is to step into the wide area and minimize the overall fluctuation of the pixels affected by the RFI in the BT image. The method tests based on SMOS visibility samples validate the correctness of the developed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]