1,373 research outputs found
Data analysis challenges in transient gravitational-wave astronomy
Gravitational waves are radiative solutions of space-time dynamics predicted
by Einstein's theory of General Relativity. A world-wide array of large-scale
and highly sensitive interferometric detectors constantly scrutinizes the
geometry of the local space-time with the hope to detect deviations that would
signal an impinging gravitational wave from a remote astrophysical source.
Finding the rare and weak signature of gravitational waves buried in
non-stationary and non-Gaussian instrument noise is a particularly challenging
problem. We will give an overview of the data-analysis techniques and
associated observational results obtained so far by Virgo (in Europe) and LIGO
(in the US), along with the prospects offered by the up-coming advanced
versions of those detectors.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, Proceedings of the ARENA'12 Conference, few minor
change
Testing the normality of the gravitational wave data with a low cost recursive estimate of the kurtosis
We propose a monitoring indicator of the normality of the output of a
gravitational wave detector. This indicator is based on the estimation of the
kurtosis (i.e., the 4th order statistical moment normalized by the variance
squared) of the data selected in a time sliding window. We show how a low cost
(because recursive) implementation of such estimation is possible and we
illustrate the validity of the presented approach with a few examples using
simulated random noises.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. In the Proceedings of the 3rd workshop on Physics
in Signal and Image Processing (Grenoble), 200
Adaptive filtering techniques for interferometric data preparation: removal of long-term sinusoidal signals and oscillatory transients
We propose an adaptive denoising scheme for poorly modeled non-Gaussian
features in the gravitational wave interferometric data. Preliminary tests on
real data show encouraging results.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Proceedings of GWDAW99 (Roma, Dec. 1999), to
appear in Int. J. Mod. Phys.
Detection of gravitational-wave bursts with chirplet-like template families
Gravitational Wave (GW) burst detection algorithms typically rely on the
hypothesis that the burst signal is "locally stationary", that is it changes
slowly with frequency. Under this assumption, the signal can be decomposed into
a small number of wavelets with constant frequency. This justifies the use of a
family of sine-Gaussian templates in the Omega pipeline, one of the algorithms
used in LIGO-Virgo burst searches. However there are plausible scenarios where
the burst frequency evolves rapidly, such as in the merger phase of a binary
black hole and/or neutron star coalescence. In those cases, the local
stationarity of sine-Gaussians induces performance losses, due to the mismatch
between the template and the actual signal. We propose an extension of the
Omega pipeline based on chirplet-like templates. Chirplets incorporate an
additional parameter, the chirp rate, to control the frequency variation. In
this paper, we show that the Omega pipeline can easily be extended to include a
chirplet template bank. We illustrate the method on a simulated data set, with
a family of phenomenological binary black-hole coalescence waveforms embedded
into Gaussian LIGO/Virgo-like noise. Chirplet-like templates result in an
enhancement of the measured signal-to-noise ratio.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures. Submitted to Class. Quantum Grav. Special issue:
Proceedings of GWDAW-14, Rome (Italy), 2010; fixed several minor issue
Best chirplet chain: near-optimal detection of gravitational wave chirps
The list of putative sources of gravitational waves possibly detected by the
ongoing worldwide network of large scale interferometers has been continuously
growing in the last years. For some of them, the detection is made difficult by
the lack of a complete information about the expected signal. We concentrate on
the case where the expected GW is a quasi-periodic frequency modulated signal
i.e., a chirp. In this article, we address the question of detecting an a
priori unknown GW chirp. We introduce a general chirp model and claim that it
includes all physically realistic GW chirps. We produce a finite grid of
template waveforms which samples the resulting set of possible chirps. If we
follow the classical approach (used for the detection of inspiralling binary
chirps, for instance), we would build a bank of quadrature matched filters
comparing the data to each of the templates of this grid. The detection would
then be achieved by thresholding the output, the maximum giving the individual
which best fits the data. In the present case, this exhaustive search is not
tractable because of the very large number of templates in the grid. We show
that the exhaustive search can be reformulated (using approximations) as a
pattern search in the time-frequency plane. This motivates an approximate but
feasible alternative solution which is clearly linked to the optimal one.
[abridged version of the abstract]Comment: 23 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev D Some
typos corrected and changes made according to referee's comment
Uncertainty and Spectrogram Geometry
International audienceUltimate possibilities of localization for time-frequency representations are first reviewed from a joint perspective, evidencing that Heisenberg-type pointwise limits are not exclusive of sharp localization along trajectories in the plane. Spectrogram reassignment offers such a possibility and, in order to revisit its connection with uncertainty, geometrical properties of spectrograms are statistically investigated in the generic case of white Gaussian noise. Based on Voronoi tessellations and Delaunay triangulations attached to extrema, it is shown that, in a first approximation, local energy ''patches'' are distributed according to a randomized hexagonal lattice with a typical scale within a factor of a few that of minimum uncertainty Gabor logons
Making Reassignment Adjustable: the Levenberg-Marquardt Approach
accepted for publication, to appear in Proc. of IEEE Int. Conf. on Acoust., Speech and Signal Proc. ICASSP-12, Kyoto (Japan), March 25-30, 2012.International audienceThis paper presents a new time-frequency reassignment process of the spectrogram, called the Levenberg-Marquardt reassignment. Compared to the classical one, this new reassignment process uses the second-order derivatives of the phase of the short-time Fourier transform, and provides the user with a setting parameter. This parameter allows him to produce either a weaker or a stronger localization of the signal components in the time-frequency plane
Power filters for gravitational wave bursts: network operation for source position estimation
A method is presented to generalize the power detectors for short bursts of
gravitational waves that have been developed for single interferometers so that
they can optimally process data from a network of interferometers. The
performances of this method for the estimation of the position of the source
are studied using numerical simulations.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of GWDAW 2002 (Classical and Quantum
Gravity, Special issue
A learning approach to the detection of gravitational wave transients
We investigate the class of quadratic detectors (i.e., the statistic is a
bilinear function of the data) for the detection of poorly modeled
gravitational transients of short duration. We point out that all such
detection methods are equivalent to passing the signal through a filter bank
and linearly combine the output energy. Existing methods for the choice of the
filter bank and of the weight parameters rely essentially on the two following
ideas: (i) the use of the likelihood function based on a (possibly
non-informative) statistical model of the signal and the noise, (ii) the use of
Monte-Carlo simulations for the tuning of parametric filters to get the best
detection probability keeping fixed the false alarm rate. We propose a third
approach according to which the filter bank is "learned" from a set of training
data. By-products of this viewpoint are that, contrarily to previous methods,
(i) there is no requirement of an explicit description of the probability
density function of the data when the signal is present and (ii) the filters we
use are non-parametric. The learning procedure may be described as a two step
process: first, estimate the mean and covariance of the signal with the
training data; second, find the filters which maximize a contrast criterion
referred to as deflection between the "noise only" and "signal+noise"
hypothesis. The deflection is homogeneous to the signal-to-noise ratio and it
uses the quantities estimated at the first step. We apply this original method
to the problem of the detection of supernovae core collapses. We use the
catalog of waveforms provided recently by Dimmelmeier et al. to train our
algorithm. We expect such detector to have better performances on this
particular problem provided that the reference signals are reliable.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figure
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