Chemical identification using Bayesian model selection

Remote detection and identification of chemicals in a scene is a challenging problem. We introduce an approach that uses some of the image's pixels to establish the background characteristics while other pixels represent the target for which we seek to identify all chemical species present. This leads to a generalized least squares problem in which we focus on 'subset selection' to identify the chemicals thought to be present. Bayesian model selection allows us to approximate the posterior probability that each chemical in the library is present by adding the posterior probabilities of all the subsets which include the chemical. We present results using realistic simulated data for the case with 1 to 5 chemicals present in each target and compare performance to a hybrid of forward and backward stepwise selection procedure using the F statistic.