Spike removal and denoising of Raman spectra by wavelet transform methods.

Wavelet decompositions of Raman spectra were investigated with respect to their usability for spike removal and denoising of the raw data. It could be shown that those operations should be performed sequentially. Suppression of spikes is not straightforwardly possible by wavelet transformation; however, the wavelet transform may be used to recognize the spikes by their first level detail coefficients. Spike locations could be projected from the details to the approximations and, further, to appropriate locations of the original spectrum. After spike recognition, those regions will be replaced by interpolated values. To complete processing, denoising is performed with the despiked spectrum by repeated application of wavelet transform methods.