We present a novel technique for pollen identification from sets of multifocal image sequences obtained from optical microscopy. Our algorithm analyzes the visual texture of pollen grains for each focal image, and performs identification using a fast sequence-matching algorithm. Although we develop a pollen-recognition protocol, the method is applicable to other microscopy object-recognition tasks. The proposed method requires little manual interaction, and does not rely on specialized imaging procedures such as florescence and deconvolution. We test our method on images of tropical fossil pollen.