  The observation of transient gravitational waves is hindered by the presence
of transient noise, colloquially referred to as glitches. These glitches can
often be misidentified as gravitational waves by searches for unmodeled
transients using the excess-power type of methods and sometimes even excite
template waveforms for compact binary coalescences while using matched filter
techniques. They thus create a significant background in the searches. This
background is more critical in getting identified promptly and efficiently
within the context of real-time searches for gravitational-wave transients.
Such searches are the ones that have enabled multi-messenger astrophysics with
the start of the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo data taking in 2015 and they
will continue to enable the field for further discoveries. With this work we
propose and demonstrate the use of a signal-based test that quantifies the
fidelity of the time-frequency decomposition of the putative signal based on
first principles on how astrophysical transients are expected to be registered
in the detectors and empirically measuring the instrumental noise. It is based
on the Q-transform and a measure of the occupancy of the corresponding
time-frequency pixels over select time-frequency volumes; we call it ``QoQ''.
Our method shows a 40% reduction in the number of retraction of public alerts
that were issued by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaborations during the third
observing run with negligible loss in sensitivity. Receiver Operator
Characteristic measurements suggest the method can be used in online and
offline searches for transients, reducing their background significantly.
