A comparative study of two data reduction methods for steel classification based on LIBS

Spectra of 27 steel samples were acquired by Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) for steel classification. Two methods were used to reduce dimensions: the first is to select characteristic lines of elements contained in the samples manually and the second is to do principal component analysis (PCA) of original spectra. Then the data after reducing dimensions was used as the input of artificial neural networks (ANN) to classify steel samples. The results show that, the better result can be achieved by selecting peak lines manually, but this solution needs much priori knowledge and wastes much time. The principal components (PCs) of original spectra were utilized as the input of artificial neural networks can also attain a good result nevertheless and this method can be developed into an automatic solution without any priori knowledge