spectrolab provides methods to read, process and visualize data from portable spectrometers and establishes a common interface to spectra that other packages can build on. The package introduces a spectra S3 class and packs a ton of functionality:

The source code can be found on our GitHub repository. Please report any bugs and ask us your questions through the issue tracker.

Installing and loading spectrolab

The best way to get spectrolab is to install it directly from GitHub. You will need the devtools package to do it.

library("devtools")
install_github("annakat/spectrolab")

Assuming that everything went smoothly, you should be able to load spectrolab like any other package.

Reading spectra

There are two ways to get spectra into R: 1) converting a matrix or data.frame to spectra or 2) reading spectra from raw data files (formats: SVC’s sig, Spectral Evolution’s sed and ASD’s asd). Here are a couple examples:

Create spectra from a matrix or data.frame

If you already have your spectra in a matrix or data frame (e.g. when you read your data from a .csv file), you can use the function as.spectra() to convert it to a spectra object. The matrix must have samples in rows and wavelengths in columns. The header of the wavelengths columns must be (numeric) wavelength labels. You also should declare which column has the sample names (which are mandatory) using the name_idx argument. If other columns are present (other than sample name and reflectances), their indices must be passed to as.spectra as the meta_idxs argument.

Here is an example using a dataset matrix named spec_matrix_meta.csv provided by the package.

dir_path = system.file("extdata/spec_matrix_meta.csv", package = "spectrolab")

# Read data from the CSV file. If you don't use `check.names` = FALSE when reading
# the csv, R will usually add a letter to the column names (e.g. 'X650') which will 
# cause problems when converting the matrix to spectra.
spec_csv = read.csv(dir_path, check.names = FALSE)

# The sample names are in column 3. Columns 1 and 2 are metadata
achillea_spec = as.spectra(spec_csv, name_idx = 3, meta_idxs = c(1,2) )

# And now you have a spectra object with sample names and metadata...
achillea_spec
## spectra object 
## number of samples: 10 
## wavelengths: 400 to 2400 (2001 bands)
## metadata (2): ident, ssp

Reading spectra: example with SVC’s .sig files

You should use the function read_spectra() to read raw spectra files. You can pass a vector of file names to read_spectra(), but it is usually easier to pass the path to the folder where your data are.

# `dir_path` is the directory where our example datasets live
dir_path = system.file("extdata", "Acer_example", package = "spectrolab")

# Read .sig files
acer_spectra = read_spectra(path = dir_path, format = "sig")

It may be the case that file names of undesirable spectra where flagged in the field, e.g with “_WR" (white reference) and “_BAD" (bad measurements). You can avoid importing such files by passing those flags to the argument exclude_if_matches in read_spectra().

# use the `exclude_if_matches` argument to excluded flagged files
acer_spectra = read_spectra(path = dir_path, format = "sig", exclude_if_matches = c("BAD","WR"))

Flagging “unusual” measurements during data collection speeds up the dataset cleanup process. However, you can also exclude bad spectra and outliers by subsetting your spectra object, as shown in the section Subsetting spectra further below.

Inspecting and querying spectra

You can check out your spectra object in several ways. For instance, You may want to know how many spectra and how many bands are in there, retrieve the file names. Of course you will need to plot the data, but that topic gets its own section further down.

# Simply print the object
acer_spectra
## spectra object 
## number of samples: 7 
## wavelengths: 340.5 to 2522.8 (1024 bands, **overlap not matched**)
## metadata: none
# Get the dataset's dimensions
dim(acer_spectra)
##     n_samples n_wavelengths 
##             7          1024

spectrolab also lets you access the individual components of the spectra. This is done with the functions names() for sample names, wavelengths() for wavelength labels, reflectance() for the reflectance matrix, and meta() for the associated metadata (in case you have any).

# Vector of all sample names. Note: Duplicated sample names are permitted
n = names(achillea_spec)

# Vector of wavelengths
w = wavelengths(achillea_spec)

# Reflectance matrix
r = reflectance(achillea_spec)

# Metadata. Use simplify = TRUE to get a vector instead of a data.frame
m = meta(achillea_spec, "ssp", simplify = TRUE)

Subsetting spectra

You can subset the spectra using a notation similar to the [i, j] function used in matrices and data.frames. The first argument in [i, ] matches sample names, whereas the second argument [ , j] matches the wavelength names. Here are some examples of how [ works in spectra:

Subsetting lets you, for instance, exclude noisy regions at the beginning and end of the spectrum or limit the data to specific entries.

# Subset wavelength regions.
spec_sub_vis = achillea_spec[ , 400:700 ]

# Subset spectra to all entries where sample_name matches "ACHMI_7" or
# get the first three samples
spec_sub_byname = achillea_spec["ACHMI_7", ]
spec_sub_byidx  = achillea_spec[ 1:3, ]

The resolution of some spectra may be different from 1nm, as is the case with SVC. In those cases, the best way to subset spectra is using the min and max arguments for wavelengths:

acer_spectra_trim = acer_spectra[ , wavelengths(acer_spectra, 400, 2400) ]

Note that you can (1) subset samples using indexes and (2) use characters or numerics to subset wavelengths. As said before, you cannot use indexes to subset wavelengths though.

# Subsetting samples by indexes works and so does subsetting wavelengths by numerics or characters.
spec_sub_byidx[1, "405"] == spec_sub_byidx[1, 405]
## ACHMI_1 
##    TRUE

But remember that you CANNOT use indexes to subset wavelengths!

# Something that is obvioulsy an index, like using 2 instead of 401 (the 2nd band 
# in our case), will fail.
spec_sub_byidx[ , 2]
## Error in i_match_label(wavelengths(x), j): Following labels not found: 2
`Error in i_match_ij_spectra(this = this, i = i, j = j) : Wavelength subscript out of bounds. Use wavelength labels instead of raw indices.`
## Error in eval(expr, envir, enclos): object 'Error in i_match_ij_spectra(this = this, i = i, j = j) : Wavelength subscript out of bounds. Use wavelength labels instead of raw indices.' not found

Plotting

The workhorse function for statically plotting spectra is plot(). It will jointly plot each spectrum in the spectra object. You should be able to pass the usual plot arguments to it, such as col, ylab, lwd, etc.

You can also plot the quantiles of a spectra object with plot_quantile(). It’s second argument, total_prob, is the total “mass” that the quantile encompasses. For instance, a total_prob = 0.95 covers 95% of the variation in the spectra object, i.e. it is the 0.025 to 0.975 quantile. The quantile plot can stand alone or be added to a current plot if add = TRUE.

The function plot_regions() helps shading different spectral regions. spectrolab provides a default_spec_regions() matrix as an example, but you obviously can customize it for your needs (see the help page for plot_regions for details).

# Simple spectra plot
par(mfrow = c(1, 3))
plot(achillea_spec, lwd = 0.75, lty = 1, col = "grey25", main = "All Spectra")

# Stand along quantile plot
plot_quantile(achillea_spec, total_prob = 0.8, col = rgb(1, 0, 0, 0.5), lwd = 0.5, border = TRUE)
title("80% spectral quantile")

# Combined individual spectra, quantiles and shade spectral regions
plot(achillea_spec, lwd = 0.25, lty = 1, col = "grey50", main="Spectra, quantile and regions")
plot_quantile(achillea_spec, total_prob = 0.8, col = rgb(1, 0, 0, 0.25), border = FALSE, add = TRUE)
plot_regions(achillea_spec, regions = default_spec_regions(), add = TRUE)

Last but not least, spectrolab also allows you to interactivelly explore spectra through a shiny app with the plot_interactive() function.

Drawing

Manipulating samples names, wavelength labels, metadata and reflectance

You may want to edit certain simple attributes of spectra, such as making all sample names lowercase This is easily attainable in spectrolab.

spec_new = achillea_spec

# Replace names with a lowercase version
names(spec_new) = tolower(names(achillea_spec))

# Check the results
names(spec_new)[1:5]
## [1] "achmi_1" "achmi_2" "achmi_3" "achmi_4" "achmi_5"

If you want to fiddle with the reflectance itself, this is easy, too.

# Scale reflectance by 0.75
spec_new = spec_new * 0.75

# Plot the results
plot(achillea_spec, col = "blue", lwd = 0.75, cex.axis = 0.75)
plot(spec_new, col = "orange", lwd = 0.75, add = TRUE)

Or you can also edit or add new metadata to the spectra object.

## Adding metadata to a spectra object: a dummy N content
n_content = rnorm(n = nrow(achillea_spec), mean = 2, sd = 0.5)
meta(achillea_spec, label = "N_percent") = n_content

Converting a spectra object into a matrix or data.frame

It is also possible to convert a spectra object to a matrix or data.frame using the as.matrix() or as.data.frame() functions. This is useful if you want to export your data in a particular format, such as csv.

If you’re converting spectra to a matrix, spectrolab will (1) place wavelengths in columns, assigning wavelength labels to colnames, and (2) samples in rows, assigning sample names to rownames. Since R imposes strict rules on column name formats and sometimes on row names, as.matrix() will try to fix potential dimname issues if fix_names != "none". Note that as.matrix() will not keep metadata.

Conversion to data.frame is similar, but keeps the metadata by default (unless you set the metadata agument to FALSE).

# Make a matrix from a `spectra` object
spec_as_mat = as.matrix(achillea_spec, fix_names = "none")
spec_as_mat[1:4, 1:3]
##                400        401        402
## ACHMI_1 0.03734791 0.03698631 0.03804012
## ACHMI_2 0.04608409 0.04536371 0.04436544
## ACHMI_3 0.04058113 0.04025678 0.03958125
## ACHMI_4 0.04063730 0.03993420 0.03793455
# Make a matrix from a `spectra` object
spec_as_df = as.data.frame(achillea_spec, fix_names = "none", metadata = TRUE)
spec_as_df[1:4, 1:5]
##   sample_name ident                   ssp N_percent        400
## 1     ACHMI_1 10526 Achillea millefolium   1.684737 0.03734791
## 2     ACHMI_2 10527 Achillea millefolium   2.011261 0.04608409
## 3     ACHMI_3 10528 Achillea millefolium   1.444402 0.04058113
## 4     ACHMI_4 10529 Achillea millefolium   2.545873 0.04063730