Low-cost approaches to robust temperature compensation in near-infrared calibration and prediction situations.

The traditional way of handling temperature shifts and other perturbations in calibration situations is to incorporate the non-relevant spectral variation in the calibration set by measuring the samples at various conditions. The present paper proposes two low-cost approaches based on simulation and prior knowledge about the perturbations, and these are compared to traditional methods. The first approach is based on augmentation of the calibration matrix through adding simulated noise on the spectra. The second approach is a correction method that removes the non-relevant variation from new spectra. Neither method demands exact knowledge of the perturbation levels. Using the augmentation method it was found that a few, in this case four, selected samples run under different conditions gave approximately the same robustness as running all the calibration samples under different conditions. For the carbohydrate data set, all robustification methods investigated worked well, including the use of pure water spectra for temperature compensation. For the more complex meat data set, only the augmentation method gave comparable results to the full global model.