A gravitational wave burst search method based on the S transform

Abstract

The detection of burst-type events in the output of ground gravitational wave observatories is particularly challenging due to the expected variety of astrophysical waveforms and the issue of discriminating them from instrumental noise. Robust methods, that achieve reasonable detection performances over a wide range of signals, would be most useful. We present a burst-detection pipeline based on a time–frequency transform, the S transform. This transform offers good time–frequency localization of energy without requiring prior knowledge of the event structure. We set a simple (and robust) event extraction chain. Results are provided for a variety of signals injected in simulated Gaussian statistics data (from the LIGO–Virgo joint working group). Indications are that detection is robust with respect to event type and that efficiency compares reasonably with reference methods. The time–frequency representation is shown to be affected by spectral features such as resonant lines. This emphasizes the role of pre-processing.