We investigate the performance of the generalized Spectral Kurtosis (SK) estimator in detecting and discriminating natural and artificial very short duration transients in the 2-bit sampling time domain Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) data. We demonstrate that, while both types of transients may be efficiently detected, their natural or artificial nature cannot be distinguished if only a time domain SK analysis is performed. However, these two types of transients become distinguishable from each other in the spectral domain, after a 32-bit FFT operation is performed on the 2-bit time domain voltages. We discuss the implication of these findings on the ability of the Spectral Kurtosis estimator to automatically detect bright astronomical transient signals of interests -- such as pulsar or fast radio bursts (FRB) -- in VLBI data streams that have been severely contaminated by unwanted radio frequency interference.
@article{arxiv.1903.00588,
title = {Statistical discrimination of RFI and astronomical transients in 2-bit digitized time domain signals},
author = {Gelu M. Nita and Aard Keimpema and Zsolt Paragi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.00588},
year = {2019}
}