Expert System for Fourier Transform Infrared Spectra Recognition Based on a Convolutional Neural Network With Multiclass Classification

Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) is a widely used spectroscopic method for routine analysis of substances and compounds. Spectral interpretation of spectra is a labor-intensive process that provides important information about functional groups or bonds present in compounds and complex substances. In this paper, based on deep learning methods of convolutional neural networks, models were developed to determine the presence of 17 classes of functional groups or 72 classes of coupling oscillations in the FT-IR spectra. Using web scanning, the spectra of 14 361 FT-IR spectra of organic molecules were obtained. Several different variants of model architectures with different sizes of feature maps have been tested. Based on the Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) and gradient-weighted class activation mapping (GradCAM) methods, visualization tools have been developed for visualizing and highlighting the areas of absorption bands manifestation for corresponding functional groups or bonds in the spectrum. To determine 17 and 72 classes, the F1-weighted metric, which is the harmonic mean of the class' precision and class' recall weighted by class' fraction, reached 93 and 88%, respectively, when using data on the position of absorption maxima in the spectrum as an additional source layer. The resulting model can be used to facilitate the routine analysis of spectra for all areas such as organic chemistry, materials science, and biology, as well as to facilitate the preparation of the obtained experimental data for publication.