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Twenty thousand leagues under plant biominerals: a deep learning implementation for automatic phytolith classification

Andriopoulou Nafsika-Chrysoula, Petrakis Georgios, Partsinevelos Panagiotis

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URIhttp://purl.tuc.gr/dl/dias/D7E80AF9-C5AC-44CC-9404-E311891AA691-
Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-023-00975-z-
Identifierhttps://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12145-023-00975-z-
Languageen-
Extent12 pagesen
TitleTwenty thousand leagues under plant biominerals: a deep learning implementation for automatic phytolith classificationen
CreatorAndriopoulou Nafsika-Chrysoulaen
CreatorΑνδριοπουλου Ναυσικα-Χρυσουλαel
CreatorPetrakis Georgiosen
CreatorΠετρακης Γεωργιοςel
CreatorPartsinevelos Panagiotisen
CreatorΠαρτσινεβελος Παναγιωτηςel
PublisherSpringeren
Content SummaryPhytoliths constitute microscopic SiO2-rich biominerals formed in the cellular system of many living plants and are often preserved in soils, sediments and artefacts. Their analysis contributes significantly to the identification and study of botanical remains in (paleo)ecological and archaeological contexts. Traditional identification and classification of phytoliths rely on human experience, and as such, an emerging challenge is to automatically classify them to enhance data homogeneity among researchers worldwide and facilitate reliable comparisons. In the present study, a deep artificial neural network (NN) is implemented under the objective to detect and classify phytoliths, extracted from modern wheat (Triticum spp.). The proposed methodology is able to recognise four phytolith morphotypes: (a) Stoma, (b) Rondel, (c) Papillate, and (d) Elongate dendritic. For the learning process, a dataset of phytolith photomicrographs was created and allocated to training, validation and testing data groups. Due to the limited size and low diversity of the dataset, an end-to-end encoder-decoder NN architecture is proposed, based on a pre-trained MobileNetV2, utilised for the encoder part and U-net, used for the segmentation stage. After the parameterisation, training and fine-tuning of the proposed architecture, it is capable to classify and localise the four classes of phytoliths in unknown images with high unbiased accuracy, exceeding 90%. The proposed methodology and corresponding dataset are quite promising for building up the capacity of phytolith classification within unfamiliar (geo)archaeological datasets, demonstrating remarkable potential towards automatic phytolith analysis.en
Type of ItemPeer-Reviewed Journal Publicationen
Type of ItemΔημοσίευση σε Περιοδικό με Κριτέςel
Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/en
Date of Item2025-07-25-
Date of Publication2023-
SubjectPhytolith automatic classificationen
SubjectSemantic-segmentationen
SubjectTransfer learningen
SubjectEmerging techniquesen
SubjectArchaeological Methoden
Bibliographic CitationN. C. Andriopoulou, G. Petrakis and P. Partsinevelos, “Twenty thousand leagues under plant biominerals: a deep learning implementation for automatic phytolith classification,” Earth Sci. Inform., vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 1551–1562, June 2023, doi: 10.1007/s12145-023-00975-z.en

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