Hyperspectral inversion of heavy metal content in reclaimed soil from a mining wasteland based on different spectral transformation and modeling methods.

Conventional methods for investigating heavy metal contamination in soil are time consuming and expensive. We explored reflectance spectroscopy as an alternative method for assessing heavy metals. Four spectral transformation methods, first-order differential (FDR), second-order differential (SDR), continuum removal (CR) and continuous wavelet transform (CWT), are used for the original spectral data. Spectral preprocessing effectively eliminated the noise and baseline drifting and also highlighted the locations of the spectral feature bands. Partial least squares regression (PLSR) and radial basis function neural network (RBF) were used to study the hyperspectral inversion of four heavy metals (Cr, As, Ni, Cd). The inversion models of four heavy metals were established in the bands with the highest correlation coefficient. The inversion effects were evaluated by the coefficient of determination (R2), root mean square error (RMSE) and residual predictive deviation (RPD) indexes. The R values of the correlation coefficient were significantly improved after smoothing and spectral transformation compared to the original waveband. The method combining continuous wavelet transform (CWT) with radial basis function neural network (RBF) had the best inversion effect on the four heavy metals. When compared to partial least squares regression (PLSR), the RMSE values were reduced by approximately 2. The CWT-RBF method can be used as a means of inversion of heavy metals in mining wasteland reclaimed land.