Quantitative assessment of soil contaminants, particularly hydrocarbons, using reflectance spectroscopy

A testing device for testing soil samples for contamination, the testing device comprising:

• a current test soil sample o, the current test soil sample having one or more unknown soil contaminants;
• a spectrometer or spectral imager configured to carry out reflectance spectroscopy on said current test sample, thereby to obtain a spectral data set from said current test sample;
• a spectral preprocessor configured to carry out a plurality of different combinations of a set of predefined preprocessing operations, each combination providing a different perturbation of said spectral data set, said spectral preprocessor further configured to remove ones of said combinations;
• a parameterizer, configured to obtain current sample spectral parameters from remaining ones of said combinations, thereby obtaining parameters of respectively different perturbations of said data set, each perturbation thereby being generated according to a respective one of said combinations of preprocessing operations, wherein said set of preprocessing operations comprises initial smoothing, multiplicative scatter correction, signal normal variate, absorption, continuum removal, first derivative, second derivative, and final smoothing;
• a model relating sets of spectral parameters obtained from spectroscopy data to respective associated one or more soil contaminants;
• and
• a spectral comparator configured to compare spectral parameter sets of said model with said spectral parameters of said current soil sample to find a set from said model that matches said spectral parameters of said current soil sample, said model thereby identifying a respective associated one or more contaminations;
• and
• an output for indicating said respective associated one or more contaminants, thereby characterizing said current test soil sample in terms of its contaminants.