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arXiv · 2512.06254

FIP-TOI: Fast Imaging Pipeline for Pulsar Localisation with a Transient-Oriented Radio Astronomical Imager

X. Li·K. Adamek·O. Bilaniuk·V. Stolyarov·W. Armour
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Abstract

Rapid localisation of radio transients requires imaging pipelines that combine low latency, high sensitivity, and accurate transient positioning. Fast Imaging Pipeline (FIP) defines a (quasi)-real-time image-based transient detection pipeline for next-generation radio telescopes such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). However, the current FIP within the SKA Science Data Processor (SDP) remains at an early stage, leaving substantial scope to improve its performance. To address this need, we develop FIP-TOI, which combines a novel Transient-Oriented Imager (TOI) with the transient detector FITrig. FIP-TOI is highly parallelised and GPU accelerated. In experiments, TOI improves signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by at least 15 compared with WSClean and SKA-SDP imagers, while providing higher positional precision than WSClean snapshot imaging. On a 396 GB MeerKAT Measurement Set containing 1500 snapshots, FIP-TOI processes the data in 170-190 s on a single NVIDIA H100, corresponding to approximately 120 ms per snapshot, while using 714 MB of RAM and about two CPU cores. Testing on diverse datasets --- including fields with multiple faint transients, an on-and-off pulsar, and a pulsar exhibiting intensity changes --- FIP-TOI demonstrates robust performance across all scenarios and achieves lower localisation errors than SKA-SDP-FIP.

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X. Li, K. Adamek, O. Bilaniuk, V. Stolyarov, W. Armour. 2025-12-06. FIP-TOI: Fast Imaging Pipeline for Pulsar Localisation with a Transient-Oriented Radio Astronomical Imager. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06254

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