Polarimetry-inspired feature fusion spectroscopy (PIFFS) for ammonia sensing in water

The sustainable use of water resources is inseparable from water pollution detection. The sensing of toxic ammonia nitrogen in water currently requires auxiliary reagents, which may cause secondary pollution. Benefiting from the ability of substances to change light characteristics, this work proposes polarimetry-inspired feature fusion spectroscopy (PIFFS) to detect ammonia. The PIFFS system mainly includes a light source, a quarter-wave plate (QWP), a linear polarizer (LP) and a fiber spectrometer. The target light containing substance information is polarization modulated by adjusting the QWP and LP angles. Then, the Stokes parameters of target light can be calculated by appropriate modulations. The feasibility of PIFFS method to detect ammonia nitrogen is verified by experiments on both standard water samples and environmental water samples. Experimental results show that inspired by the first Stokes parameter, the fused features provide superiority in classifying ammonia concentration. The results also demonstrate the effectiveness of support vector machine-based concentration classification and random forests-based spectral selection. The interaction between light and substances ensures that the proposed PIFFS method has the potential to detect other pollutants.