Automatic recognition of coccoliths by dynamical neural networks

Système de Reconnaissance Automatique de Coccolithes (SYRACO) is a tool for automatic recognition of coccoliths by neural networks. Previous versions of this tool were able to identify individual species of coccoliths with a high reliability, but failed in that many coccoliths were overlooked. SYRACO was able to identify only about half the coccoliths present in a field of view. We have now developed a new type of Neural Network, which includes a dynamic view of the object analysed. We have added parallel neural networks, which perform five types of simple image transformation to the general back-propagation neural network. This new dynamic version of SYRACO is able to identify individual coccoliths even more reliably at the same time as it is able to recognize almost all coccoliths present in a field of view. The only remaining problem concerns the inclusion of objects that are not coccoliths. This problem can be solved partly by performing a secondary SYRACO analysis of output images. The performance of the current system is demonstrated using the study of 21 EUMELI sediment trap samples.