Context. The LOFAR (LOw Frequency ARray) radio telescope is a giant digital phased array interferometer with multiple antennas distributed in Europe. It provides discrete sets of Fourier components of the sky brightness. Recovering the original brightness distribution with aperture synthesis forms an inverse problem that can be solved by various deconvolution and minimization methods. Aims. Recent papers have established a clear link between the discrete nature of radio interferometry measurement and the "compressed sensing" (CS) theory, which supports sparse reconstruction methods to form an image from the measured visibilities. Empowered by proximal theory, CS offers a sound framework for efficient global minimization and sparse data representation using fast algorithms. Combined with instrumental direction-dependent effects (DDE) in the scope of a real instrument, we developed and validated a new method based on this framework. Methods. We implemented a sparse reconstruction method in the standard LOFAR imaging tool and compared the photometric and resolution performance of this new imager with that of CLEAN-based methods (CLEAN and MS-CLEAN) with simulated and real LOFAR data. Results. We show that i) sparse reconstruction performs as well as CLEAN in recovering the flux of point sources, ii) performs much better on extended objects (the root mean square error is reduced by a factor of up to 10), and iii) provides a solution with an effective angular resolution 2-3 times better than the CLEAN images. Conclusions. Sparse recovery gives a correct photometry on high dynamic and wide-field images and improved realistic structures of extended sources (of simulated and real LOFAR datasets). This sparse reconstruction method is compatible with modern interferometric imagers that handle DDE corrections (A-and W-projections) required for current and future instruments such as LOFAR and SKA.

Compressed sensing theory is slowly making its way to solve more and more astronomical inverse problems. We address here the application of sparse representations, convex optimization and proximal theory to radio interferometric imaging. First, we expose the theory behind interferometric imaging, sparse representations and convex optimization, and second, we illustrate their application with numerical tests with SASIR, an implementation of the FISTA, a ForwardBackward splitting algorithm hosted in a LOFAR imager. Various tests have been conducted in Garsden et al., 2015. The main results are: i) an improved angular resolution (super resolution of a factor ≈ 2) with point sources as compared to CLEAN on the same data, ii) correct photometry measurements on a field of point sources at high dynamic range and iii) the imaging of extended sources with improved fidelity. SASIR provides better reconstructions (five time less residuals) of the extended emission as compared to CLEAN. With the advent of large radiotelescopes, there is scope for improving classical imaging methods with convex optimization methods combined with sparse representations.

In this paper, we first present a new implementation of the 3-D fast curvelet transform, which is nearly 2.5 less redundant than the Curvelab (wrapping-based) implementation as originally proposed in [1, 2], which makes it more suitable to applications including massive data sets. We report an extensive comparison in denoising with the Curvelab implementation as well as other 3-D multi-scale transforms with and without directional selectivity. The proposed implementation proves to be a very good compromise between redundancy, rapidity and performance. Secondly, we exemplify its usefulness on a variety of applications including denoising, inpainting, video de-interlacing and sparse component separation. The obtained results are good with very simple algorithms and virtually no parameter to tune.