Automatic baseline subtraction significantly improves the quality of high-background spectra but might harm low-background spectra.

In this work, we present an extensive dataset of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) spectra for the pre-training and evaluation of LIBS classification models. LIBS is a well-established spectroscopic method for in-situ and industrial applications, where LIBS is primarily applied for clustering and classification tasks. As such, our dataset is aimed at helping with the development and testing of classification and clustering methodologies. Moreover, the dataset could be used to pre-train classification models for applications where the amount of available data is limited. The dataset consists of LIBS spectra of 138 soil samples belonging to 12 distinct classes. The spectra were acquired with a state-of-the-art LIBS system. Lastly, the composition of each sample is also provided, including estimated uncertainties.