Offline and online reconstruction for radio interferometric imaging

Radio astronomy is transitioning to a big-data era due to the emerging generation of radio interferometric (RI) telescopes, such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which will acquire massive volumes of data. In this article we review methods proposed recently to resolve the ill-posed inverse problem of imaging the raw visibilities acquired by RI telescopes in the big-data scenario. We focus on the recently proposed online reconstruction method [4] and the considerable savings in data storage requirements and computational cost that it yields.