Back Home: A Machine Learning Approach to Seashell Classification and Ecosystem Restoration

In Costa Rica, an average of 5 tons of seashells are extracted from ecosystems annually. Confiscated seashells, cannot be returned to their ecosystems due to the lack of origin recognition. To address this issue, we developed a convolutional neural network (CNN) specifically for seashell identification. We built a dataset from scratch, consisting of approximately 19000 images from the Pacific and Caribbean coasts. Using this dataset, the model achieved a classification accuracy exceeding 85%. The model has been integrated into a user-friendly application, which has classified over 36,000 seashells to date, delivering real-time results within 3 seconds per image. To further enhance the systems accuracy, an anomaly detection mechanism was incorporated to filter out irrelevant or anomalous inputs, ensuring only valid seashell images are processed. O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=102 SRC="FIGDIR/small/632036v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (57K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@12ebc7forg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1595433org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1a71e82org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@c415c3_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG