## Automatic Segmentation and Clustering of Spectral Terahertz Data

• The goal of this thesis is to find ways to improve the analysis of hyperspectral Terahertz images. Although it would be desirable to have methods that can be applied on all spectral areas, this is impossible. Depending on the spectroscopic technique, the way the data is acquired differs as well as the characteristics that are to be detected. For these reasons, methods have to be developed or adapted to be especially suitable for the THz range and its applications. Among those are particularly the security sector and the pharmaceutical industry. Due to the fact that in many applications the volume of spectra to be organized is high, manual data processing is difficult. Especially in hyperspectral imaging, the literature is concerned with various forms of data organization such as feature reduction and classification. In all these methods, the amount of necessary influence of the user should be minimized on the one hand and on the other hand the adaption to the specific application should be maximized. Therefore, this work aims at automatically segmenting or clustering THz-TDS data. To achieve this, we propose a course of action that makes the methods adaptable to different kinds of measurements and applications. State of the art methods will be analyzed and supplemented where necessary, improvements and new methods will be proposed. This course of action includes preprocessing methods to make the data comparable. Furthermore, feature reduction that represents chemical content in about 20 channels instead of the initial hundreds will be presented. Finally the data will be segmented by efficient hierarchical clustering schemes. Various application examples will be shown. Further work should include a final classification of the detected segments. It is not discussed here as it strongly depends on specific applications.

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