“…The classification of microfossils was first attempted by obtaining key morphological parameters from microfossil images (Marmo et al, 2006;Yu et al, 1996), with support vector machines (SVMs) contributing to their classification according to the acquired values (Apostol et al, 2016;Bi et al, 2015;Hu and Davis, 2005;Solano et al, 2018;Xu et al, 2020). Owing to 6 the development of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), deep learning based classification models have successfully been used to determine the taxa of various microfossils including foraminifera and radiolarians (Carvalho et al, 2020;Hsiang et al, 2019;Itaki et al, 2020;Keçeli et al, 2017;Marchant et al, 2020;Mitra et al, 2019;Pires de Lima et al, 2020;Xu et al, 2020;Tetard et al, 2020). Although some of these classification models achieve an accuracy of > 85% (Hsiang et al, 2019;Itaki et al, 2020;Marchant et al, 2020;Tetard et al, 2020), large training datasets are often required, which creates the challenge of generating a large number of images for each microfossil species.…”