AOFlagger
AOFlagger public interface API

Introduction

The AOFlagger is a flagger framework that implements several methods to deal with radio-frequency interference or RFI. Some of the implemented algorithms that are part of the flagging strategy, are the SumThreshold method, background fitting techniques (smoothing, sliding window, median filters, high-pass filters) and morphological operators. AOFlagger is distributed under the GPL 3 open-source license.

I have spent a lot of time on this package, and I believe it is the best flagger available. If you use this package for scientific work, please acknowledge my work and cite the following two papers that have introduced the new algorithms:

About the API

This document describes the API of the public interface. This interface can be used to integrate the flagger into an observatory pipeline in an easy way, without having to know the internals of the flagger. If you want to integrate this flagger in your pipeline, the best place to start is to read the class description of class aoflagger::AOFlagger.

To use libaoflagger, add an "#include <aoflagger.h>" to your C++ program and link with "-laoflagger". For installation instructions, check the website.

The official webpage of the package is http://aoflagger.sourceforge.net/ . The full package contains this library along with several programs to execute the flagger on measurement sets, tweak it and visualize results. The package contains the following executables:

  • aoflagger: executes a given flagging strategy on a full measurement set (replacement for the older 'rficonsole' executable).
  • rfigui: for analyzing RFI, data and for strategy parameter tweaking.
  • aoqplot: for fast visualization of statistics, to assert the generic data quality.

See also the AOFlagger Wiki on Sourceforge for information, which includes a section with Frequency Asked Questions. Additionally, the LOFAR imaging cookbook contains a lot of general info about running the flagger.