Fast fitting of multi-exponential decay curves

In the analysis of time-resolved measurements of fluorescence decays, one is usually confronted with the essentially non-linear fitting problems. There are several standard methods for non-linear minimisation, but they are all very sensitive to initial guess parameters and are time-consuming. Recently, Sasaki and Masuhara and independently Apanasovich and Novikov proposed an elegant method of quasi-linearising the problem of multi-exponential fitting. In the present paper it will be shown, that their method can be improved by better taking into account the statistical character of the measured data.