A Conditional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Radio Interferometric Image Reconstruction

In radio astronomy, signals from radio telescopes are transformed into images of observed celestial objects, or sources. However, these images, called dirty images, contain real sources as well as artifacts due to signal sparsity and other factors. Therefore, radio interferometric image reconstruction is performed on dirty images, aiming to produce clean images in which artifacts are reduced and real sources are recovered. So far, existing methods have limited success on recovering faint sources, preserving detailed structures, and eliminating artifacts. In this paper, we present VIC-DDPM, a Visibility and Image Conditioned Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model. Our main idea is to use both the original visibility data in the spectral domain and dirty images in the spatial domain to guide the image generation process with DDPM. This way, we can leverage DDPM to generate fine details and eliminate noise, while utilizing visibility data to separate signals from noise and retaining spatial information in dirty images. We have conducted experiments in comparison with both traditional methods and recent deep learning based approaches. Our results show that our method significantly improves the resulting images by reducing artifacts, preserving fine details, and recovering dim sources. This advancement further facilitates radio astronomical data analysis tasks on celestial phenomena.