A machine learning based approach to the segmentation of micro CT data in archaeological and evolutionary sciences

Abstract

Segmentation of high-resolution tomographic data is often an extremely time-consuming task and until recently, has usually relied upon researchers manually selecting materials of interest slice by slice. With the exponential rise in datasets being acquired, this is clearly not a sustainable workflow. In this paper, we apply the Trainable Weka Segmentation (a freely available plugin for the multiplatform program ImageJ) to typical datasets found in archaeological and evolutionary sciences. We demonstrate that Trainable Weka Segmentation can provide a fast and robust method for segmentation and is as effective as other leading-edge machine learning segmentation techniques.