The detection of gravitational waves has inaugurated the era of gravitational
astronomy and opened new avenues for the multimessenger study of cosmic
sources. Thanks to their sensitivity, the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo
interferometers will probe a much larger volume of space and expand the
capability of discovering new gravitational wave emitters. The characterization
of these detectors is a primary task in order to recognize the main sources of
noise and optimize the sensitivity of interferometers. Glitches are transient
noise events that can impact the data quality of the interferometers and their
classification is an important task for detector characterization. Deep
learning techniques are a promising tool for the recognition and classification
of glitches. We present a classification pipeline that exploits convolutional
neural networks to classify glitches starting from their time-frequency
evolution represented as images. We evaluated the classification accuracy on
simulated glitches, showing that the proposed algorithm can automatically
classify glitches on very fast timescales and with high accuracy, thus
providing a promising tool for online detector characterization.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Classical and
Quantum Gravit