universe up to cosmological distances. For instance, statistical analysis of several binary coalescences enables the estimation of the Hubble constant to an accuracy better than 10% [@SCH86; @Mar93; @Fin96]. Events that produce high signal-to-noise ratio can be potentially used to observe such non-linear effects, as gravitational wave tails, and to put general relativity into test in the strongly non-linear regime [@BS95]. Due to the weak coupling of gravitational radiation with matter the signal waveform has a very low amplitude and will not stand above the detector noise. In addition to the on-going efforts to reduce the noise, and hence increase the sensitivity of the detector, a considerable amount of research activity has gone into the development of efficient and robust data analysis techniques to extract signals buried in very noisy data. For a review on gravitational waves from compact objects and their detection see Thorne [@Th95a; @Th95b].

Various data analysis schemes have been proposed for the detection of the ‘chirp’ waveform from such systems. Among them the technique of matched filtering is the most promising [@Th87; @HEL; @SCH89]. Briefly, this technique involves correlating the detector output with a set of templates, each of which is tuned to detect the signal 