Microscopic Pollen Image Classification via Contour-Signal Representation, Wavelet Analysis, and CNN

Accurate classification of pollen grains in microscopic images remains challenging because of noise, structural variability, background complexity, weak texture, and intra-class similarity. To address these issues, this study proposes a hybrid framework that integrates contour-signal modeling, spectral-wavelet analysis, and deep learning for robust microscopic pollen image recognition. In the proposed approach, microscopic pollen images are first converted into contour-based point-signal representations, allowing object boundaries to be analyzed as structured one-dimensional signals. To improve signal quality under real imaging conditions, the framework incorporates Gaussian, median, and contour-aware filtering together with defect-point detection and correction. The processed contour signals are then analyzed using Fourier transform, continuous wavelet transform, and discrete wavelet transform to extract complementary global and local descriptors. These enriched representations are provided to a convolutional neural network for final classification. Experiments conducted on a seven-class microscopic pollen-image dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms conventional computer-vision and baseline deep-learning approaches. The best-performing hybrid configuration achieved an error rate of 6.4%, while the overall classification accuracy reached 0.977 with an F1-score of 0.966, compared with 0.837 for a traditional computer-vision pipeline. These results confirm that combining contour-based signal processing with hierarchical deep feature learning provides an effective and noise-robust strategy for microscopic pollen image recognition. However, the present validation is limited to pollen images, and further experiments on broader microscopic object datasets are required to assess generalization to other micro-object categories such as nanoparticles, fibers, rods, and synthetic microstructures.