Recognition of Rare Microfossils Using Transfer Learning and Deep Residual Networks

doi:10.3390/biology12010016

NIGPAS OpenIR

	Recognition of Rare Microfossils Using Transfer Learning and Deep Residual Networks
通讯作者	Yang, Xiaoguang(lqzy0301@gmail.com) ; Zhang, Tao(zhangtao129@nwu.edu.cn)
	Wang, Bin 1; Sun, Ruyue 1; Yang, Xiaoguang 2,3; Niu, Ben 1; Zhang, Tao 1; Zhao, Yuandi 1; Zhang, Yuanhui 1; Zhang, Yiheng 1; Han, Jian 2
	2023
发表期刊	BIOLOGY-BASEL
卷号	12 期号:1 页码:14
摘要	Simple Summary The collection of early Cambrian microfossils leads to the amassing of a pile of thousands of tiny tubes, grains and various fragments. Rare type of microfossils with high academic value are mingled with numerous ordinary fossils and the traditional way of manual selection is very inefficient. Many artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have already been applied in fossil image recognition, but current methods largely depend on a great number of fossil images to "train" the AI model. However, usually only a handful of samples are available for specific rare fossil taxa and these cannot provide enough photos for AI. In this study, we fine-tuned a new convolutional neural network, combining pre-trained models from a nature image database to solve the problem of the lack of training materials. Through many tests, this new model was proved valid. It presented relatively high accuracies in recognizing specific micro fossil taxa, while the required number of corresponding fossil images is very low. Various microfossils from the early Cambrian provide crucial clues for understanding the Cambrian explosion and the origin of animal phyla. However, specimens with important anatomical structures are extremely rare and the efficiency of retrieving such fossils by traditional manual selection under a microscope is quite low. Such a contradiction has hindered breakthroughs in micropaleontology for a long time. Here, we propose a solution for identifying specific taxa of Cambrian microfossils using only a few available specimens by transferring a model pre-trained on natural image datasets to the field of paleontological artificial intelligence. The method employs a 34-layer deep residual neural network as the underlying framework, migrates the ImageNet pre-trained model, freezes the low-layer network parameters and retrains the high-layer parameters to build a microfossil image recognition model. We built training sets with randomly selected images of varied number for each taxon. Our experiments show that the average recognition accuracy for specific taxa of Cambrian microfossils (50 images for each taxon) is higher than 0.97 and it can reach 0.85 with only three training samples per taxon. Comparative analyses indicate that our results are much better than those of various prevalent methods, such as the transpose convolutional neural network (TCNN). This demonstrates the feasibility of using natural images (ImageNet) for the training of microfossil recognition models and provides a promising tool for the discovery of rare fossils.
关键词	early Cambrian microfossils small sample transfer learning residual network
DOI	10.3390/biology12010016
收录类别	SCI
语种	英语
关键词[WOS]	SOUTHERN SHAANXI ; ASEXUAL REPRODUCTION ; FOSSIL ; RECORD
WOS研究方向	Life Sciences & Biomedicine - Other Topics
WOS类目	Biology
WOS记录号	WOS:000914310200001
出版者	MDPI
文献类型	期刊论文
条目标识符	http://ir.nigpas.ac.cn/handle/332004/41769
专题	中国科学院南京地质古生物研究所
通讯作者	Yang, Xiaoguang; Zhang, Tao
作者单位	1.Northwest Univ, Sch Informat Sci & Technol, Xian 710069, Peoples R China 2.Northwest Univ, Dept Geol, Shaanxi Key Lab Early Life & Environm, State Key Lab Continental Dynam, Xian 710069, Peoples R China 3.Chinese Acad Sci, Nanjing Inst Geol & Palaeontol, State Key Lab Palaeobiol & Stratig, Nanjing 210008, Peoples R China
通讯作者单位	中国科学院南京地质古生物研究所
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Wang, Bin,Sun, Ruyue,Yang, Xiaoguang,et al. Recognition of Rare Microfossils Using Transfer Learning and Deep Residual Networks[J]. BIOLOGY-BASEL,2023,12(1):14.
APA	Wang, Bin.,Sun, Ruyue.,Yang, Xiaoguang.,Niu, Ben.,Zhang, Tao.,...&Han, Jian.(2023).Recognition of Rare Microfossils Using Transfer Learning and Deep Residual Networks.BIOLOGY-BASEL,12(1),14.
MLA	Wang, Bin,et al."Recognition of Rare Microfossils Using Transfer Learning and Deep Residual Networks".BIOLOGY-BASEL 12.1(2023):14.