Unsupervised Representations of Pollen in Bright-Field Microscopy

Abstract: We present the first unsupervised deep learning method for pollen analysis using bright-field microscopy. Using a modest dataset of 650 images of pollen grains collected from honey, we achieve family level identification of pollen. We embed images of pollen grains into a low-dimensional latent space and compare Euclidean and Riemannian metrics on these spaces for clustering. We propose this system for automated analysis of pollen and other microscopic biological structures which have only small or unlabelled datasets available.