| Airborne passive Fourier transform infrared spectrometry is gaining increased attention in environmental applications because of its great flexibility. Usually, pattern recognition techniques are used for automatic analysis of large amount of collected data. However, challenging problems are the constantly changing background and high calibration cost. As aircraft is flying, background is always changing. Also, considering the great variety of backgrounds and high expense of data collection from aircraft, cost of collecting representative training data is formidable.;Instead of using airborne data, data generated from simulation strategies can be used for training purposes. Training data collected under controlled conditions on the ground or synthesized from real backgrounds can be both options. With both strategies, classifiers may be developed with much lower cost.;For both strategies, signal processing techniques need to be used to extract analyte features. In this dissertation, signal processing methods are applied either in interferogram or spectral domain for features extraction. Then, pattern recognition methods are applied to develop binary classifiers for automated detection of air-collected methanol and ethanol vapors. The results demonstrate, with optimized signal processing methods and training set composition, classifiers trained from ground-collected or synthetic data can give good classification on real air-collected data.;Near-infrared (NIR) spectrometry is emerging as a promising tool for noninvasive blood glucose detection. In combination with multivariate calibration techniques, NIR spectroscopy can give quick quantitative determinations of many species with minimal sample preparation. However, one main problem with NIR calibrations is degradation of calibration model over time. The varying background information will worsen the prediction precision and complicate the multivariate models. To mitigate the needs for frequent recalibration and improve robustness of calibration models, signal processing methods can be used to decrease the influence of such non-constant background variation.;In this dissertation, signal processing methods are also applied to NIR single-beam spectra collected during short-term and long-term studies. The prediction performance of the calibration models demonstrates, with suppression of non-constant background information by optimal wavelet processing procedures, robustness of calibration models with time can be significantly improved. |
