Searching for gravitational-wave transients with a qualitative signal model: seedless clustering strategies

Understand

Gravitational-wave bursts are observable as bright clusters of pixels in spectrograms of strain power.

• Clustering algorithms can be used to identify candidate gravitational-wave events.
• Clusters are often identified by grouping together seed pixels in which the power exceeds some threshold.
• If the gravitational-wave signal is long-lived, however, the excess power may be spread out over many pixels, none of which are bright enough to become seeds.