A statistics-guided progressive RAST algorithm for peak template matching in GCxGC

Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GCxGC) is an emerging technology for chemical separation. Chemical identification is one of the critical tasks in GCxGC analysis. Peak template matching is a technique for automatic chemical identification. Peak template matching can be formulated as a point pattern matching problem. This paper proposes a progressive RAST algorithm to solve the problem. Search space pruning techniques based on peak location distributions and transformation distributions are also investigated for guided search. Experiments on seven real data sets indicate that the new techniques are effective.