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abstract: |
    With the on going construction of several large and medium scale laser interferometric gravitational wave antennas around the globe, the problem of the detection of gravitational waves has acquired great impetus. Since gravitational wave signals from astrophysical sources are expected to be weak, despite the state of the art technology being employed, the development of optimal signal extraction techniques and the consequent accurate determination of the parameters of the signal is of major importance. Coalescing binary systems are one of the most promising sources of gravitational waves. One reason is that such sources are easier to model and thus one can design detection strategies tuned to such signals. A lot of attention has been devoted in the literature studying such techniques and most of the work has revolved around matched filtering and maximum likelihood estimation.

    In a previous work, Monte Carlo simulations were carried out of the detection process using matched filtering for the initial LIGO/VIRGO configuration for the first post-Newtonian corrected coalescing binary waveform. We had compared the results of our simulations with available estimates, obtained from covariance matrix considerations, of the errors in the determination of the parameters. Our results showed that the covariance matrix 