A baseline correction algorithm for Raman spectroscopy by adaptive knots B-spline

The Raman spectroscopy technique is a powerful and non-invasive technique for molecular fingerprint detection which has been widely used in many areas, such as food safety, drug safety, and environmental testing. But Raman signals can be easily corrupted by a fluorescent background, therefore we presented a baseline correction algorithm to suppress the fluorescent background in this paper. In this algorithm, the background of the Raman signal was suppressed by fitting a curve called a baseline using a cyclic approximation method. Instead of the traditional polynomial fitting, we used the B-spline as the fitting algorithm due to its advantages of low-order and smoothness, which can avoid under-fitting and over-fitting effectively. In addition, we also presented an automatic adaptive knot generation method to replace traditional uniform knots. This algorithm can obtain the desired performance for most Raman spectra with varying baselines without any user input or preprocessing step. In the simulation, three kinds of fluorescent background lines were introduced to test the effectiveness of the proposed method. We showed that two real Raman spectra (parathion-methyl and colza oil) can be detected and their baselines were also corrected by the proposed method.