A simple background elimination method for Raman spectra

In this paper, we consider a new background elimination method for Raman spectra. The proposed method is based on peak detection. smoothing, and interpolation. Since the background is usually slowly varying with respect to wavelength, we could estimate the background by eliminating significant peaks. For this purpose, we seek the peaks by inspecting the smoothed derivative of a given spectrum. After clipping out the corresponding peak regions, we estimate the background by applying a modified linear interpolation. Then the background is eliminated from the measured Raman spectrum by simple subtraction. The experimental results showed that the proposed method gave satisfactory results for real Raman spectra as well as synthetic data. As the proposed method requires no prior knowledge of spectrum, we expect that the method could be applied to other spectral data as well. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.