Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and chemometrics for the discrimination of paper relic types

The paper relic identification is a pending issue to be resolved in the field of cultural heritage. As we all known, heritage paper has significant importance in archaeological research. Nowadays, there are a variety of research methodologies focuses on the analysis of inks for dating documents. While the paper analysis attained little attention. This work is to explore the non-destructive application of ATR-FTIR technique in discrimination of paper relics. 15 types of paper spectra were collected by ATR-FTIR, which wavenumber range were range from 4000 to 650 cm−1. And the moving average smoothing and normalization was used for pretreatment analysis. Five different classification algorithms, principal component analysis-linear discriminant analysis (PCA-LDA), partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), soft independent modeling of class analogy (SIMCA), least squares-support vector machine (LS-SVM), partial least squares-linear discriminant analysis (PLS-LDA) were selected to classify the types of paper. PLS-LDA and LS-SVM are effective techniques with 100% classification accuracy. PCA-LDA, PLS-DA and SIMCA give accuracy of 98.67%, 97.33% and 95.56%, respectively. The present experiment suggested that ATR-FTIR combining with chemometrics will be highly useful in paper identification of cultural heritage.