Morphology exploration of pollen using deep learning latent space

Abstract

The structure of pollen has evolved depending on its local environment, competition, and ecology. As pollen grains are generally of size 10–100 microns with nanometre-scale substructure, scanning electron microscopy is an important microscopy technique for imaging and analysis. Here, we use style transfer deep learning to allow exploration of latent w-space of scanning electron microscope images of pollen grains and show the potential for using this technique to understand evolutionary pathways and characteristic structural traits of pollen grains.