Smoothing Raman Spectra with Contiguous Single-Channel Fitting of Voigt Distributions: An Automated, High-Quality Procedure

Theoretical probability distributions are often fitted to the individual peaks of Raman spectra to decompose them and facilitate further analyses. Fitting has the additional advantage of eliminating noise. We have exploited this noise-eliminating attribute of fitting procedures in an automated algorithm to smooth Raman spectra. An initial smoothing was performed by fitting Voigt distributions to every channel in a spectrum. The Voigt distribution characters used were strongly Gaussian, the distribution widths equal to the spectral resolution, and their initial amplitudes equal to the spectral intensities at the channels where they were located. The smoothed spectrum was then subtracted from the original noisy spectrum to obtain a residual. For channels where the residual exceeded a limit-of-detection threshold, the distribution width was decreased. The fitting was then repeated until a secondary, lower limit distribution width was reached. The residual was then smoothed repeatedly in the same manner until the minimum distribution width was reached. After each repetition, the smoothed residual was added to the smoothed spectrum. The process was continued until a combined limit of detection and chi-squared stopping criterion was reached. Although slower in comparison to spline- and Savitzky–Golay-based methods, the smoothing quality was significantly better allowing the majority of smoothed spectra, in contrast to these methods, to pass a stringent smoothing quality test.