Searching for Alternatives to the Savitzky–Golay Filter in the Spectral Processing Domain

Abstract

An elegant, well-established effective data filter concept, proposed originally by Abraham Savitzky and Marcel J.E. Golay, is undoubtedly a very effective tool, however not free from limitations and drawbacks. Despite the latter, over the years it has become a "monopolist” in many fields of spectra processing, claiming a "commercial" superiority over alternative approaches, which would potentially allow to obtain equivalent or in some cases even more reliable results. In order to show that basic operations performed on spectral datasets, like smoothing or differentiation, do not have to be equated to the application of the one particular single algorithm, several of such alternatives are briefly presented within this paper and discussed with regard to their practical realization. A special emphasis is put on the fast Fourier methodology (FFT), being widespread in the general domain of signal processing. Finally, a user-friendly Matlab routine, in which the outlined algorithms are implemented, is shared, so that one can select and apply the technique of spectral data processing more adequate for their individual requirements without the need to code it prior to use.

Overview and Recent Advances in Hyphenated Electrochemical Techniques for the Characterization of Electroactive Materials

“…Therefore, the detection of the noisy signal and a previous smoothing data process is mandatory. Some of the routines for this purpose are filters based on the low-pass Fast Fourier Transformations (FFT filter) or Savitzky–Golay (SG) smoothing data [ 47 , 48 , 49 ], among others. Most of the commercial and free software for plotting data include them.…”

Application of the Savitzky-Golay filter in multi-spectral signal processing

“…[9]- [11]. The reason for using the Savitzky-Golay filter is that it is a method that can refine signals to obtain important patterns in the data by removing noise in the data so that good and clear fluctuation patterns are displayed on the signal graph [12].…”