The Radio Camera Initiative

The purpose of the Radio Camera Initiative (RCI) is to develop a highly optimized high-throughput end-to-end pipeline for near real-time flagging, calibration and imaging with very large-N radio interferometer arrays (thousands of antennas) such as the 2000-element Deep Synoptic Array (DSA-2000), recently proposed to the 2020 Astronomy Decadal Survey, as well as Phase 2 of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). In a 3-year program, the RCI will culminate in the demonstration of a streaming version of a pipeline on model datasets. One of the goals of the initiative is to take advantage of the near-complete sampling possible with large-N arrays to remove visibility-based deconvolution (e.g. Cotton-Schwab CLEAN) and the associated expensive gridding/de-gridding from the pipeline, replacing it when necessary with image-based CLEAN, or forgoing it altogether for some other image reconstruction method such as compressed sensing. The RCI will enable future large arrays to replace traditional correlators with a 'radio camera' - an integrated digital back-end that will produce the final image data in near real-time.