Abstract
A method for eliminating baseline variation is proposed for use on biological FT-IR spectra. This method is motivated by the fact that baselines are often assumed to be low-degree polynomials. Spectra are expanded in terms of a set of orthonormal polynomials derived from the Legendre polynomials, and leading terms of the expansion, which contain most of the baseline variation, are removed. An application of this method to protein spectra is presented and discussed.