An overview of signal processing issues in chemical sensing

This tutorial paper aims at summarizing some problems, ranging from analytical chemistry to novel chemical sensors, that can be addressed with classical or advanced methods of signal and image processing. We gather them under the denomination of “chemical sensing”. It is meant to introduce the special session “Signal Processing for Chemical Sensing” with a large overview of issues which have been and remain to be addressed in this application domain, including chemical analysis leading to PARAFAC/tensor methods, hyper spectral imaging, ion-sensitive sensors, artificial nose, chromatography, mass spectrometry, etc. For enlarging and illustrating the points of view of this tutorial, the invited papers of the session consider other applications (NMR, Raman spectroscopy, recognition of explosive compounds, etc.) addressed by various methods, e.g. source separation, Bayesian, and exploiting typical chemical signal priors like positivity, linearity, unit-concentration or sparsity.