Multiresolution techniques for the detection of gravitational-wave bursts

We present two search algorithms that implement logarithmic tiling of the time–frequency plane in order to efficiently detect astrophysically unmodelled bursts of gravitational radiation. The first is a straightforward application of the dyadic wavelet transform. The second is a modification of the windowed Fourier transform which tiles the time–frequency plane for a specific Q . In addition, we also demonstrate adaptive whitening by linear prediction, which greatly simplifies our statistical analysis. This is a methodology paper that aims to describe the techniques for identifying significant events as well as the necessary pre-processing that is required in order to improve their performance. For this reason we use simulated LIGO noise in order to illustrate the methods and to present their preliminary performance.