The interplay of chemometrics and hyperspectral chemical imaging

While originally pioneered for use in airborne based imaging of the surface of the earth, hyperspectral imaging (HSI) has now entered the analytical chemistry laboratory and the field of online process automation [1,2]. The advent of chemometrics has revolutionized both near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy and more recently hyperspectral imaging, permitting the extraction of reliable chemical information utilizing the application of multivariate statistic algorithms to non-invasive spectroscopic techniques. Chemometrics has enabled the systematic probing of massive HSI datasets from a chemistry point of view, and thereby the creation of spatial chemical image maps. Recently a sharp u-turn in the path of advancing technology has been made: development of highly interactive exploratory software tools now facilitates the use of HSI for the further exploration and understanding of chemometrics. The interplay between these two developing technologies, chemometrics and hyperspectral imaging, is explored in this presentation.