Sperm hunting on optical microscope slides for forensic analysis with deep convolutional networks – a feasibility study

Zurich Institute of Forensic Medicine

Finding sperm cells under an optical microscope is a task which is time-consuming and difficult for a human being. This study shows how convolutional neural networks can be used to speed up the process. Two networks were tested based on the VGG19 architecture with a resulting accuracy of over 90%. Human oversight is still necessary to rule out false positives. The oversight is aided by a simple visual guide that can be provided to the overseeing experts which helps determine the accuracy of any given result.