A multi-level preprocessing and modelling framework for spectral imaging of microplastics

Abstract

Spectral imaging provides chemically specific and spatially resolved analysis of microplastics, but its routine application is hindered by large data volumes, acquisition artefacts, spectral variability, and misidentification of polymers due to alike spectra. This study proposes a multi-level preprocessing and modelling framework for FT-IR spectral imaging of microplastics that integrates image-level, tile-level, and spectral-level corrections with scalable identification strategies. Image-level variation associated with changing acquisition conditions was done with latent variable selection, while a background-based tile correction reduced illumination-related artefacts. Spectral preprocessing combined baseline correction, smoothing, derivative calculation, normalization, and wavelength selection, and only particle spectra were retained for further analysis to improve computational efficiency. For scalable identification, clustering was applied to particle spectra and spectral library matching was performed on cluster centroids instead of individual pixels. Among twelve evaluated matching strategies, a sign-invariant derivative-based cosine similarity method achieved perfect classification accuracy for polystyrene (PS), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyethylene (PE), and polypropylene (PP). The clustering-based workflow also produced more spatially coherent particle maps than direct software-based matching while substantially reducing processing time. The framework was evaluated for supervised classification-based MP indentification. These results show that multi-level correction combined with cluster-centroid spectral matching improves the robustness, efficiency, and interpretability of spectral-imaging-based microplastic identification.