Suppressing the charged coupled device noise in univariate thin-layer videoscans: a comparison of several algorithms

The digital processing of chromatographic thin-layer plate images has increasing popularity among last years. When using a camera instead of flatbed scanner, the charged coupled device (CCD) noise is a well-known problem-especially when scanning dark plates with weakly fluorescing spots. Various techniques are proposed to denoise (smooth) univariate signals in chemometric processing, but the choice could be difficult. In the current paper the classical filters (Savitzky-Golay, adaptive degree polynomial filter, Fourier denoising, Butterworth and Chebyshev infinite impulse response filters) were compared with the wavelet shrinkage (31 mother wavelets, 3 thresholding techniques and 8 decomposition levels). The signal obtained from 256 averaged videoscans was treated as the reference signal (with noise naturally suppressed, which was found to be almost white one). The best choice for denoising was the Haar mother wavelet with soft denoising and any decomposition level larger than 1. Satisfying similarity to reference signal was also observed in the case of Butterworth filter, Savitzky-Golay smoothing, ADPF filter, Fourier denoising and soft-thresholded wavelet shrinkage with any mother wavelet and middle to high decomposition level. The Chebyshev filters, Whittaker smoother and wavelet shrinkage with hard thresholding were found to be less efficient. The results obtained can be used as general recommendations for univariate denoising of such signals.