STRIPE

SPOTLIGHT Time-domain RFI Processing Engine

STRIPE is a high-performance module for mitigating "stripe-like" Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) in SPOTLIGHT beam-formed data.

It implements:

• Skewness-Kurtosis Filter (SKF)
• Time-domain patch flagging
• Band equalization
• Baseline correction

Gaussian noise replacement of flagged samples
Designed for efficient block-based processing of large time-frequency datasets.
Adapted from PulsarX's filtool

Installation

git clone https://github.com/RaghavWani/STRIPE.git
cd STRIPE

# compile using script
./compile.sh

# or manually 
g++ -O3 -march=native -std=c++17 ./rfi_mitigation.cpp -o stripe

Requirements

• GCC ≥ 7 (with C++17 support)
• Linux environment (tested on x86_64)
• Standard C++ libraries only (no external dependencies!)

Usage

./stripe <input.raw> <block_size> <IQR_threshold>

Arguments

Argument	Description
input.raw	8-bit time-freq binary data file
block_size	Number of time samples processed per block
IQR_threshold	Threshold multiplier for SKF-based bad channel detection

Output file is automatically created as <input_filename>_stripe.raw in the same directory as the input file.

Data Assumptions (SPOTLIGHT Beam Mode)

• Frequency channels: 4096
• Time resolution: 1.31072 ms
• Bits per sample: 8
• Mean, Std dev of output data: 64, 3
• Baseline width: 0