Independent component analysis classification of laser induced breakdown spectroscopy spectra

•We use a novel independent component analysis method to classify LIBS spectra.•We demonstrate the usefulness of ICA.•We report the performances of the ICA classification.•We compare it to other classical classification schemes.

The ChemCam instrument on board Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover uses the laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) technique to remotely analyze Martian rocks. It retrieves spectra up to a distance of seven meters to quantify and to quantitatively analyze the sampled rocks. Like any field application, on-site measurements by LIBS are altered by diverse matrix effects which induce signal variations that are specific to the nature of the sample. Qualitative aspects remain to be studied, particularly LIBS sample identification to determine which samples are of interest for further analysis by ChemCam and other rover instruments. This can be performed with the help of different chemometric methods that model the spectra variance in order to identify a the rock from its spectrum. In this paper we test independent components analysis (ICA) rock classification by remote LIBS. We show that using measures of distance in ICA space, namely the Manhattan and the Mahalanobis distance, we can efficiently classify spectra of an unknown rock. The Mahalanobis distance gives overall better performances and is easier to manage than the Manhattan distance for which the determination of the cut-off distance is not easy. However these two techniques are complementary and their analytical performances will improve with time during MSL operations as the quantity of available Martian spectra will grow. The analysis accuracy and performances will benefit from a combination of the two approaches.