Efficient, robust, and scale-invariant decomposition of Raman spectra

Raman spectroscopy is used to identify unknown constituent minerals and their abundances since Raman spectra convey characteristic information about the sample´s chemical structure. We present a novel method to identify constituting pure minerals in a mixture by comparing the measured Raman spectra with a reference database. Our method comprises of two major components: A novel scale-invariant spectral matching technique, that allows to compare measured spectra with the reference spectra from the database even when the band intensities are not directly comparable and an iterative unmixing scheme to decompose a measured spectrum into its constituent minerals and compute their abundances.