The Hough transform search for continuous gravitational waves

TL;DR

This paper introduces an incoherent Hough transform-based method for detecting continuous gravitational waves, analyzing its implementation, statistical properties, and sensitivity for different data input types.

Contribution

It presents a novel application of the Hough transform to gravitational wave data analysis, detailing implementation and performance for two search strategies.

Findings

Effective detection of continuous gravitational waves demonstrated.

Analysis of statistical properties and sensitivities provided.

Method applicable to different data processing approaches.

Abstract

This paper describes an incoherent method to search for continuous gravitational waves based on the Hough transform, a well known technique used for detecting patterns in digital images. We apply the Hough transform to detect patterns in the time-frequency plane of the data produced by an earth-based gravitational wave detector. Two different flavors of searches will be considered, depending on the type of input to the Hough transform: either Fourier transforms of the detector data or the output of a coherent matched-filtering type search. We present the technical details for implementing the Hough transform algorithm for both kinds of searches, their statistical properties, and their sensitivities.