Inversion of visible optical extinction data for spheroid particle size distribution based on PCA

The problem of light scattering properties of spheroid particles is studied, and a general approach is presented for calculating the single particle light scattering of spheroids. In this approach, the extinction efficiency of spheroid particles can be calculated by combining the spline interpolation of T matrix method and ADA (anomalous diffraction approximation) theory. Furthermore, the retrieval of spheroid particle size distribution is performed in the dependent mode and a selection method about the optical extinction data is proposed based on PCA (principle component analysis) of first derivative corresponding to the raw optical extinction. By calculating the contribution rate of first derivative corresponding to the raw optical extinction, the optical extinction with more significant features can be selected as the inversion optical extinction data. In this way, the selected optical extinction has less information redundancy and higher capacity of resisting noise disturbance. Simulation experiments indicate that the spheroid particle size distributions obtained with the proposed method coincide fairly well with the given distributions, which provides a simple, reliable and efficient method to retrieve the spheroid particle size distribution using the optical extinction data.