Abstract Steel is a pillar industry of the national economy, in which scrap, as an important secondary raw material for steel production, is of great significance for its rapid identification in order to realize accurate classification for recycling and reuse. In this paper, Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) combined with the Restricted Boltzmann machine-Backpropagation algorithm (RBM-BP) is used for the rapid identification of 13 steel samples. Based on the collected spectral data, sp