Toward Practical Augmentation of Raman Spectra for Deep Learning Classification of Contamination in HDD

Abstract

Deep learning techniques provide powerful solutions to several pattern-recognition problems, including Raman spectral classification. However, these networks require large amounts of labeled data to perform well. Labeled data, which are typically obtained in a laboratory, can potentially be alleviated by data augmentation. This study investigated various data augmentation techniques and applied multiple deep learning methods to Raman spectral classification. Raman spectra yield fingerprint-like information about chemical compositions, but are prone to noise when the particles of the material are small. Five augmentation models were investigated to build robust deep learning classifiers: weighted sums of spectral signals, imitated chemical backgrounds, extended multiplicative signal augmentation, and generated Gaussian and Poisson-distributed noise. We compared the performance of nine state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks with all the augmentation techniques. The LeNet5 models with background noise augmentation yielded the highest accuracy when tested on real-world Raman spectral classification at 88.33% accuracy. A class activation map of the model was generated to provide a qualitative observation of the results.