Detection of Einstein Telescope gravitational wave signals from binary black holes using deep learning

The expected volume of data from the third-generation gravitational waves (GWs) Einstein Telescope (ET) detector would make traditional GWs search methods such as match filtering impractical. This is due to the large template bank required and the difficulties in waveforms modelling. In contrast, machine learning (ML) algorithms have shown a promising alternative for GWs data analysis, where ML can be used in developing semi-automatic and automatic tools for the detection, denoising and parameter estimation of GWs sources. Compared to second generation detectors, ET will have a wider accessible frequency band but also a lower noise. The ET will have a detection rate for Binary Black Holes (BBHs) and Binary Neutron Stars (BNSs) of order 10 5 − 10 6 year − 1 and 7 × 10 4 year − 1 respectively. In this work, we explore the possibility and efficiency of using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for the detection of BBHs’ mergers in synthetic GWs signals buried in gaussian noise. The data was generated according to the ET’s parameters using open-source tools. Without performing data whitening or applying bandpass filtering, we trained four CNN networks with the state-of-the-art performance in computer vision, namely VGG, ResNet and DenseNet. ResNet has significantly better performance, detecting BBHs sources with SNR of 8 or higher with 98.5% accuracy, and with 92.5%, 85%, 60% and 62% accuracy for sources with SNR range of 7-8, 6-7, 5-6 and 4-5 respectively. ResNet, in qualitative evaluation, was able to detect a BBH’s merger at 60 Gpc with 4.3 SNR. It was also shown that, using CNN for BBH’s merger on long time series data is computationally efficient, and can be used for near-real-time detection.