Precise automatic classification of 46 different pollen types with convolutional neural networks

In palynology, the visual classification of pollen grains from different species is a hard task which is usually tackled by human operators using microscopes. Many industries, including medical and pharmaceutical, rely on the accuracy of this manual classification process, which is reported to be around 67%. In this paper, we propose a new method to automatically classify pollen grains using deep learning techniques that improve the correct classification rates in images not previously seen by the models. Our proposal manages to properly classify up to 98% of the examples from a dataset with 46 different classes of pollen grains, produced by the Classifynder classification system. This is an unprecedented result which surpasses all previous attempts both in accuracy and number and difficulty of taxa under consideration, which include types previously considered as indistinguishable.