Detecting optical transients using artificial neural networks and reference images from different surveys

Understand

To search for optical counterparts to gravitational waves, it is crucial to develop an efficient follow-up method that allows for both a quick telescopic scan of the event localization region and search through the resulting image data for plausible optical transients.

• We present a method to detect these transients based on an artificial neural network.
• We describe the architecture of two networks capable of comparing images of the same part of the sky taken by different telescopes.
• One image corresponds to the epoch in which a potential transient could exist; the other is a reference image of an earlier epoch.