A rapid automatic spectroscopic identification method of environmental microplastics

The increasing presence of microplastics in the marine environment has gained continuous concerns, and the accurate identification of microplastics is a precondition in waste management or waste recycling. Spectroscopic analytical technology is a widely used method in microplastics identification. It works well with a known material stock but fails in the blind identification of realistic samples. Generally, the required manual work of denying the unmatched samples cannot be avoided during the microplastics spectral analysis. This paper built an open model in identifying the diversity environmental microplastics sample. The result showed that the recognition accuracy of the FTIR technology combined with a novel opened classifier could reach 0.955 accuracy with all the non plastic sample denied automatically.

Automated summary

This paper presents a novel method for identifying microplastic samples in the environment, achieving an accuracy of 0.955 when combined with FTIR technology and a new opened classifier, and automatically rejecting non-plastic samples.