Comparison of filters for gravitational wave burst detection by interferometric detectors

During the last few years, several filters have been developed for the detection of short gravitational waves. In this presentation we give the main results of a comparison of time domain filters using simulated noise data. This benchmark focused on three points: the filter efficiency versus the false alarm rate for different families of signals, the accuracy of the signal arrival time estimation and the robustness of the filters to a non-perfect whitening procedure of the detector noise. It has been shown that it is mandatory to use a battery of filters because their performance depends on the signal. Concerning the timing accuracy, one can expect a precision much smaller than 1 ms even for low signal-to-noise-ratio signals as long as the waveforms exhibit a well defined peak. Finally, we have determined the requirements on the data whitening procedure which are needed to be able to predict the false alarm rate.