Unsupervised hyperspectral stimulated Raman microscopy image enhancement: denoising and segmentation via one-shot deep learning

Hyperspectral stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy is a label-free technique for biomedical and mineralogical imaging which can suffer from low signal-to-noise ratios. Here we demonstrate the use of an unsupervised deep learning neural network for rapid and automatic denoising of SRS images: UHRED (Unsupervised Hyperspectral Resolution Enhancement and Denoising). UHRED is capable of “one-shot” learning; only one hyperspectral image is needed, with no requirements for training on previously labelled datasets or images. Furthermore, by applying a k-means clustering algorithm to the processed data, we demonstrate automatic, unsupervised image segmentation, yielding, without prior knowledge of the sample, intuitive chemical species maps, as shown here for a lithium ore sample.