An Algorithm for the Removal of Cosmic Ray Artifacts in Spectral Data Sets

Cosmic ray artifacts may be present in all photo-electric readout systems. In spectroscopy, they present as random unidirectional sharp spikes that distort spectra and may have an affect on post-processing, possibly affecting the results of multivariate statistical classification. A number of methods have previously been proposed to remove cosmic ray artifacts from spectra but the goal of removing the artifacts while making no other change to the underlying spectrum is challenging. One of the most successful and commonly applied methods for the removal of comic ray artifacts involves the capture of two sequential spectra that are compared in order to identify spikes. The disadvantage of this approach is that at least two recordings are necessary, which may be problematic for dynamically changing spectra, and which can reduce the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio when compared with a single recording of equivalent duration due to the inclusion of two instances of read noise. In this paper, a cosmic ray artefact ...