Using neural networks to detect microfossil teeth in somosaguas sur paleontological site

Abstract

Automatic microfossil detection system allows to extract the position of the microfossils in a concentrate of mineral grains, speeding up the time required to analyze each sample. In this paper we study the use of Multilayer Perceptrons and Radial Basis Function Networks applied to the automatic microfossil teeth detection problem, focusing on the dependence of the performance with the size of the network, and with the size of the training set. The data used in the experiments are three images of concentrates with micromammal teeth from Somosaguas paleontological site, in Madrid (Spain). The obtained results demonstrate RBFNs perform better than MLPs in most of the considered cases, detecting most of the microfossil teeth in the images. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.