Super-resolution and Raman chemical imaging: from multiple low resolution images to a high resolution image

Imaging in Raman spectroscopy is a valuable tool for analytical chemistry. Although molecular characterization at micron level is achieved for many applications, it usually fails producing chemical images of micron size samples as expected in chemical, environmental and biological analysis. The aim of the work is to introduce the potential of super-resolution in vibrational spectroscopic imaging. This original chemometrics approach uses several low resolution images of the same sample in order to retrieve a higher resolution chemical image. It is thus possible to overcome in a certain way some physical and instrumentals limitations. To illustrate the methodology, sub-micronic details of a Si/Au sample are retrieved from low resolution images with different super-resolution algorithms. The better results are obtained with Iterative L2/Bilateral Total Variation regularization method. The use of a regularization procedure gives also better results since its first property is to preserve edges during the reconstruction of the super-resolved image. This concept of chemical image data processing should open new analytical opportunities.