Manual identification of fission tracks has practical problems, such as variation due to observer-observation efficiency. An automatic processing method that could identify fission tracks in a photomicrograph could solve this problem and improve the speed of track counting. However, separation of nontrivial images is one of the most difficult tasks in image processing. Several commercial and free softwares are available, but these softwares are meant to be used in specific images. In this paper, an automatic method based on starlet wavelets is presented in order to separate fission tracks in mineral photomicrographs. Automatization is obtained by Matthews correlation coefficient, and results are evaluated by precision, recall and accuracy. This technique is an improvement of a method aimed at segmentation of scanning electron microscopy images. This method is applied in photomicrographs of epidote phenocrystals, in which accuracy higher than 89% was obtained in * Corresponding author. Phones: +55 (18)

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Spectroscopic and morphological studies, designed to improve our understanding of the physicochemical phenomena that occur during zircon crystallization, are presented. The zircon fission track method (ZFTM) is used routinely in various laboratories around the world; however, there are some methodological difficulties needing attention. Depending on the surface fission track density observed under an optical microscope, the zircon grain surfaces are classified as homogeneous, heterogeneous, hybrid, or anomalous. In this study, zircon grain surfaces are characterized using complementary techniques such as optical microscopy (OM), micro-Raman spectroscopy, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM), both before and after chemical etching. Our results suggest that anomalous grains have subfamilies and that etching anisotropy related to heterogeneous grains is due to different crystallographic faces within the same polished surface that cannot be observed under an optical microscope. The improved methodology was used to determine the zircon fission track ages of samples collected from the Bauru Group located in the north of Paraná Basin, Brazil. A total of 514 zircon grains were analyzed, consisting of 10% homogeneous, about 10% heterogeneous, about 20% hybrid, and 60% anomalous grains. These results show that the age distributions obtained for homogeneous, heterogeneous, and hybrid grains are both statistically and geologically compatible.

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