An Overview of Infrared Spectroscopy Based on Continuous Wavelet Transform Combined with Machine Learning Algorithms: Application to Chinese Medicines, Plant Classification, and Cancer Diagnosis

Infrared spectroscopy has been a workhorse technique for materials analysis and can result in positively identifying many different types of material. In recent years there have been reports using wavelet analysis and machine learning algorithms to extract features of Fourier transform infrared spectrometry (FTIR). The machine learning algorithms contain back-propagation neural network (BPNN), radial basis function neural network (RBFNN), and support vector machine (SVM). This article reviews the important advances in FTIR analysis employing a continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and machine learning algorithms, especially in the applications of the method for Chinese medicine identification, plant classification, and cancer diagnosis.