MARS: the First Romanian Pollen Dataset using a Rapid-E Particle Analyzer

Pollen allergies are a growing concern for human health. This is why automated pollen monitoring is becoming an important area of research. Machine learning approaches show great promise for tackling this issue but these algorithms need large training data sets to perform well. This study introduces a new pollen data set, obtained using a Rapid-E particle analyzer, that is representative for the flora of Romania. Pollen, from thirteen species present in Romania, was used in developing this database with over 100 thousand samples measured. Our study shows performance similar to or above that of humans in the task of pollen classification on the newly introduced data set using a convolutional neural network.