When Convolutional Neural Networks Meet Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy: End-to-End Quantitative Analysis Modeling of ChemCam Spectral Data for Major Elements Based on Ensemble Convolutional Neural Networks

Modeling the quantitative relationship between target components and measured spectral information is an essential part of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) analysis. However, many traditional multivariate analysis algorithms must reduce the spectral dimension or extract the characteristic spectral lines in advance, which may result in information loss and reduced accuracy. Indeed, improving the precision and interpretability of LIBS quantitative analysis is a critical challenge in Mars exploration. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an end-to-end lightweight quantitative modeling framework based on ensemble convolutional neural networks (ECNNs). This method eliminates the need for dimensionality reduction of the raw spectrum along with other pre-processing operations. We used the ChemCam calibration dataset as an example to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Compared with partial least squares regression (a linear method) and extreme learning machine (a nonlinear method), our proposed method resulted in a lower root-mean-square error for major element prediction (54% and 73% lower, respectively) and was more stable. We also delved into the internal learning mechanism of the deep CNN model to understand how it hierarchically extracts spectral information features. The experimental results demonstrate that the easy-to-use ECNN-based regression model achieves excellent prediction performance while maintaining interpretability.