Location of SMOS RFI Sources Using a Matrix Completion Approach

Abstract

The artificial sources emitting close to or/and in the L-band are contaminating the collected remote sensing data and deteriorating the performance of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission. Detecting and locating such sources is crucial to improve the quality of SMOS scientific products. In this paper, we present an approach based on matrix completion (MC) for localization of radio-frequency interference (RFI) sources. This approach exploits the low-rank property of the augmented covariance matrix (ACM) of the sparse array, and addresses the ACM incompleteness (i.e., sampling data loss) due to inherent array geometry (e.g., the SMOS Y-shaped array). Some experimental results indicate that, compared with existing approaches based on the discrete Fourier transformation (DFT) inversion and direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation, the proposed MC approach has better performance such as superior spatial resolution and reduced artifacts.