SpecGrav -- Detection of Gravitational Waves using Deep Learning

Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time that travel at the speed of light. The detection of gravitational waves by LIGO is a major breakthrough in the field of astronomy. Deep Learning has revolutionized many industries including health care, finance and education. Deep Learning techniques have also been explored for detection of gravitational waves to overcome the drawbacks of traditional matched filtering method. However, in several researches, the training phase of neural network is very time consuming and hardware devices with large memory are required for the task. In order to reduce the extensive amount of hardware resources and time required in training a neural network for detecting gravitational waves, we made SpecGrav. We use 2D Convolutional Neural Network and spectrograms of gravitational waves embedded in noise to detect gravitational waves from binary black hole merger and binary neutron star merger. The training phase of our neural network was of about just 19 minutes on a 2GB GPU.

Detecting residues of cosmic events using residual neural network

The detection of gravitational waves is considered to be one of the most magnificent discoveries of the century. Due to the high computational cost of matched filtering pipeline, there is a hunt for an alternative powerful system. I present, for the first time, the use of 1D residual neural network for detection of gravitational waves. Residual networks have transformed many fields like image classification, face recognition and object detection with their robust structure. With increase in sensitivity of LIGO detectors we expect many more sources of gravitational waves in the universe to be detected. However, deep learning networks are trained only once. When used for classification task, deep neural networks are trained to predict only a fixed number of classes. Therefore, when a new type of gravitational wave is to be detected, this turns out to be a drawback of deep learning. Shallow neural networks can be used to learn data with simple patterns but fail to give good results with increase in complexity of data. Remodelling the neural network with detection of each new type of GW is highly infeasible. In this letter, I also discuss ways to reduce the time required to adapt to such changes in detection of gravitational waves for deep learning methods. Primarily, I aim to create a custom residual neural network for 1-dimensional time series inputs, which can learn a ton of features from dataset without giving up on increasing the number of classes or increasing the complexity of data. I use the two class of binary coalescence signals (Binary Black Hole Merger and Binary Neutron Star Merger signals) detected by LIGO to check the performance of residual structure on gravitational waves detection.