As radio telescopes become more sensitive, radio frequency interference (RFI) is becoming more important for interesting signals of radio astronomy. There is a demand for developing an automatic, accurate and efficient RFI mitigation method. Therefore, we have investigated an RFI detection algorithm. First, we introduce an asymmetrically reweighted penalized least squares (ArPLS) method to estimate the baseline more accurately. After removing the estimated baseline, several novel strategies were proposed based on the SumThreshold algorithm for detecting different types of RFI. The threshold parameter in SumThreshold can be determined automatically and adaptively. The adaptiveness is essential for reducing human intervention and for the online RFI processing pipeline. Applications to data from the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) show that the proposed scheme based on ArPLS and SumThreshold is superior to some typically available methods for RFI detection with respect to efficiency and performance.

In the version of this article initially published, an equal-contributor footnote was missing for authors H. Xu, J. R. Niu and P. Chen. The Author contributions section has been amended to read "H.X., J.R.N. and P.C. contributed equally and led the data analysis". The changes have been made to the HTML and PDF versions of the article.