# A Brain-Inspired Deep Separation Network for Single Channel Raman Spectra Unmixing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22324 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22324/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [SDR - half-baked or well done?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02508/) (2018)
- [Conv-TasNet: Surpassing Ideal Time-Frequency Magnitude Masking for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07454/) (2018)
- [Supervised Speech Separation Based on Deep Learning: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07524/) (2017)
- [Deep clustering: Discriminative embeddings for segmentation and separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04306/) (2015)
- [Dual-path RNN: efficient long sequence modeling for time-domain single-channel speech separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06379/) (2019)
- [TasNet: time-domain audio separation network for real-time, single-channel speech separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00541/) (2017)
- [An efficient encoder-decoder architecture with top-down attention for speech separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15200/) (2022)
- [Speech Separation Using an Asynchronous Fully Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02321/) (2021)
- [EndNet: Sparse AutoEncoder Network for Endmember Extraction and Hyperspectral Unmixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01894/) (2017)
- [Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Raman Spectrum Recognition: A Unified Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.09022/) (2017)
- [Hyperspectral unmixing for Raman spectroscopy via physics-constrained autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04526/) (2024)
- [On-the-fly spectral unmixing based on Kalman filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15636/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Raman spectra obtained in real world applications are often a noisy combination of several spectra of various substances in a tested sample. Unmixing such spectra into individual components corresponding to each of the substances is of great value and has been a longstanding challenge in Raman spectroscopy. Existing unmixing methods are predominantly designed to invert an overdetermined mixed model and therefore require multiple mixed spectra as input. However, open domain and/or non-cooperative detection applications in Raman spectroscopy such as controlled substance detection, call for single-channel solutions which can identify individual components from thousands of candidates by analyzing only a single noisy mixed spectrum. To our knowledge, sparse regression is the only existing solution which can cope with this scenario, yet it has very low tolerance to noises and can hardly be applicable in practice. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel neural approach for single-channel Raman spectrum unmixing inspired by speech separation. It aims at solving underdetermined systems and can decompose a noisy mixed spectrum from a library of thousands of components (substances). The core of our method is a deep separation neural network (RSSNet) which takes a mixed spectrum as input and outputs spectra of pure components. We created two synthetic datasets of single-channel Raman spectra unmixing and demonstrated feasibility and superiority of RSSNet on these datasets (outperform competing methods by >4dB). Furthermore, we verified that RSSNet, trained solely on synthetic data, can successfully unmix real-world mixed spectra of mixtures of mineral powders, exhibiting strong generalization. Our approach represents a new paradigm for Raman unmixing and enables new possibilities for fast detection of Raman mixtures.