Recent advances allow for the construction of filters with precisely defined frequency response for use in Raman chemical spectroscopy. In this paper we give a probabilistic interpretation of the output of such filters and use this to give an algorithm to design optimal filters to minimize the mean squared error in the estimated photon emission rates for multiple spectra. Experiments using these filters demonstrate that detecting as few as ~10 Raman scattered photons in as little time as ~30μs can be sufficient to positively distinguish chemical species. This speed should allow "chemical imaging" of samples.

Date Published: 14 February 2013
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 8657, Computational Imaging XI, 865707 (14 February 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2012700

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8657:
Computational Imaging XI
Charles A. Bouman; Ilya Pollak; Patrick J. Wolfe, Editor(s)