Denoising of Raman Spectra Using a Neural Network Based on Variational Mode Decomposition, Empirical Wavelet Transform, and Encoder-Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory

Raman spectroscopy has been widely applied in numerous fields including bioanalysis, disease diagnosis, and molecular recognition, owing to its unique advantages of being non-invasive, rapid, and highly specific. However, the acquisition of Raman spectral data is often susceptible to various noise interferences, such as shot noise from the internal detector and dark current noise from the instrument. As a result, the weak Raman signals typically become arduous to discern, which affects the localization and identification of characteristic spectral peaks. This study investigates variational mode decomposition (VMD), empirical wavelet transform (EWT), and integrated encoder-bidirectional long short-term memory (EBiLSTM) modules to propose a neural network algorithm for adaptive denoising of Raman spectra. By combining VMD and EWT, the Raman spectra are decomposed into several sub-sequences, which solves the problem of mode mixing between high-frequency signals and noise in empirical mode decomposition, and significantly reduces the complexity of the original Raman spectral lines. The correlation coefficient between each modal component and the original signal is calculated along with the zero-crossing rate index to categorize the noise and signal sequences. Leveraging the linear differences between the ideal spectral lines and the noisy spectral curves, an encoder-bidirectional long short-term memory (EBiLSTM) denoising network is constructed for hierarchical denoising to extract valid spectral feature information from the high-frequency components, realizing refined adaptive denoising of the Raman spectra. Industry standard objective evaluation metrics on the signal-to-noise ratio and root mean square error are utilized to conduct simulation experiments comparing state-of-the-art algorithms, including empirical mode decomposition, VMD, sliding window averaging, and wavelet thresholding. The experimental results demonstrate that the Raman spectral denoising algorithm combining variational mode decomposition and neural networks improves the denoising performance by 13.38% to 72%, exhibiting higher accuracy and reliability.