Speeding up Raman spectral imaging by the three-dimensional low rank estimation method.

Raman spectral imaging has been widely used as a very important analytical tool in various fields. For obtaining the high spectral signal-to-noise ratio Raman images, the long integration time is necessary, which is placing a limit on the application of Raman spectral imaging. We introduce a simple and feasible numerical method of the Three-dimensional Low Rank Estimation (3D-LRE), which can speed up the data acquisition process of the Raman spectral imaging. The spectral signal-to-noise ratio of the Raman images can be increased by over 75 times and the speed of the data acquisition can be improved by over 30 times. By combining with line-scan or multifocus-scan techniques, the Raman images can be obtained in a few seconds.