Radio-astronomical observations are increasingly contaminated by
interference, and suppression techniques become essential. A powerful candidate
for interference mitigation is adaptive spatial filtering. We study the effect
of spatial filtering techniques on radio astronomical imaging. Current
deconvolution procedures such as CLEAN are shown to be unsuitable to spatially
filtered data, and the necessary corrections are derived. To that end, we
reformulate the imaging (deconvolution/calibration) process as a sequential
estimation of the locations of astronomical sources. This not only leads to an
extended CLEAN algorithm, the formulation also allows to insert other array
signal processing techniques for direction finding, and gives estimates of the
expected image quality and the amount of interference suppression that can be
achieved. Finally, a maximum likelihood procedure for the imaging is derived,
and an approximate ML image formation technique is proposed to overcome the
computational burden involved. Some of the effects of the new algorithms are
shown in simulated images. Keywords: Radio astronomy, synthesis imaging,
parametric imaging, interference mitigation, spatial filtering, maximum
likelihood, minimum variance, CLEAN.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figures. Paper with higher resolution color figures at
http://cobalt.et.tudelft.nl/~leshem/postscripts/leshem/imaging.ps.g