Automated detection of microfossil fish teeth from slide images using combined deep learning models

Microfossil fish teeth, known as ichthyoliths, provide a key constraint on the depositional age and environment of deep-sea sediments, especially pelagic clays where siliceous and calcareous microfossils are rarely observed. However, traditional methods for the observation of ichthyoliths require considerable time and manual labor, which can hinder their wider application. In this study, we constructed a system to automatically detect ichthyoliths in microscopic images by combining two open source deep learning models. First, the regions for ichthyoliths within the microscopic images are predicted by the instance segmentation model Mask R–CNN. All the detected regions are then re-classified using the image classification model EfficientNet-V2 to determine the classes more accurately. Compared with only using the Mask R–CNN model, the combined system offers significantly higher performance (89.0% precision, 78.6% recall, and an F1 score of 83.5%), demonstrating the utility of the system. Our system can also predict the lengths of the teeth that have been detected, with more than 90% of the predicted lengths being within ±20% of measured length. This system provides a novel, automated, and reliable approach for the detection and length measurement of ichthyoliths from microscope images that can be applied in a range of paleoceanographic and paleoecological contexts.