Weighted-averaging-based classification of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy measurements using most informative spectral lines

In this study, efficient spectral line selection and weighted-averaging-based processing schemes are proposed for the classification of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) measurements. For fast on-line classification, a set of representative spectral lines are selected and processed relying on the information metric, instead of the time consuming full spectrum based analysis. The most informative spectral line sets are investigated by the joint mutual information estimation (MIE) evaluated with the Gaussian kernel density, where dominant intensity peaks associated with the concentrated components are not necessarily most valuable for classification. In order to further distinguish the characteristic patterns of the LIBS measured spectrum, two-dimensional spectral images are synthesized through column-wise concatenation of the peaks along with their neighbors. For fast classification while preserving the effect of distinctive peak patterns, column-wise Gaussian weighted averaging is applied to the synthesized images, yielding a favorable trade-off between classification performance and computational complexity. To explore the applicability of the proposed schemes, two applications of alloy classification and skin cancer detection are investigated with the multi-class and binary support vector machines classifiers, respectively. The MIE measures associated with selected spectral lines in both applications show a strong correlation to the actual classification or detection accuracy, which enables to find out meaningful combinations of spectral lines. In addition, the peak patterns of the selected lines and their Gaussian weighted averaging with neighbors of the selected peaks efficiently distinguish different classes of LIBS measured spectrum.