Vespucci: A Free, Cross-Platform Tool for Spectroscopic Data Analysis and Imaging

Abstract

Vespucci is a software application developed for imaging and analysis of hyperspectral datasets. Vespucci offers several advantages over other software packages, including a simple user interface with a small learning curve, no cost, and less restrictive licensing. Vespucci expands several analysis techniques including univariate imaging, principal components analysis, partial-least-squares regression, and vertex components analysis with endmember extraction, and k-means clustering. Additionally, Vespucci can perform a number of useful data-processing operations, including filtering, normalization, baseline correction, and background subtraction. Datasets that consist of spatial or temporal data with a corresponding digital signal, including spectroscopic images, mass spectrometric images, and X-ray diffraction data can be processed in this software. A few use cases for Raman and surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopies are provided. Vespucci is written in C++ and makes use of the MLPACK [3], Armadillo [9], Qt, and QCustomPlot libraries. Vespucci is a graphically-driven package that is designed with ease-of-use in mind and is equally capable to other available tools. Vespucci’s capabilities are extended by interfaces to Octave and R to allow existing research code to be run from a common environment. Additionally, Vespucci’s C++ classes can be used to construct more specialized programs when an application programming interface (API) is desired. The source code and a Windows binary distribution can be accessed at https://github.com/dpfoose/Vespucci.