We perform classification of ancient Roman Republican coins via recognizing their reverse motifs where various objects, faces, scenes, animals, and buildings are minted along with legends. Most of these coins are eroded due to their age and varying degrees of preservation, thereby affecting their informative attributes for visual recognition. Changes in the positions of principal symbols on the reverse motifs also cause huge variations among the coin types. Lastly, in-plane orientations, uneven illumination, and a moderate background clutter further make the task of classification non-trivial and challenging. To this end, we present a novel network model, CoinNet, that employs compact bilinear pooling, residual groups, and feature attention layers. Furthermore, we gathered the largest and most diverse image dataset of the Roman Republican coins that contains more than 18,000 images belonging to 228 different reverse motifs. On this dataset, our model achieves a classification accuracy of more than and outperforms the conventional bag-of-visual-words based approaches and more recent state-of-the-art deep learning methods. We also provide a detailed ablation study of our network and its generalization capability.
The first exclusive method for ancient coins @cite_9 uses a combination of local feature descriptors @cite_37 @cite_26 @cite_45 to perform an exemplar-based classification. Zambanini and Kampel @cite_31 apply dense correspondence-based feature matching called SIFT flow @cite_32 . To improve the quality of local features matching, Zambanini al @cite_17 employ the geometric consistency of the matched features. Similarly, a more customized descriptor for ancient coin classification called Local Image Descriptor Robust to Illumination Changes (LIDRIC) @cite_36 is proposed to alleviate the sensitivity to illumination changes. To sum up, in the absence of training data, the feature matching-based methods achieve acceptable classification rates. However, they are not easily scalable to more extensive datasets. They disregard the inherent domain-specific knowledge, which is extremely important from a numismatics perspective to make the classification task complaint with the standard reference books in this subject.
@cite_37 @cite_26 @cite_36 @cite_9 @cite_32 @cite_45 @cite_31 @cite_17
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Classification of ancient coins is a substantial part of numismatic research which needs a large amount of expert knowledge due to the high number of classes to be considered. In this paper we propose an automatic image-based classification method for ancient coins to support this time-consuming and difficult process. We demonstrate that previously proposed learning-based methods suffer from the practical conditions of this problem: a high number of classes, limited number of training samples per class and complex intra-class variations. As a solution we propose a similarity metric based on feature correspondence which is designed to be robust against the possible intra-class coin variations like degraded parts, non-rigid deformations and illumination-induced appearance changes. The similarity metric is used in an exemplar-based ancient coin classification scheme which shows to outperform previously proposed methods for ancient coin recognition. Experiments are conducted on a dataset of 60 Roman Republican coin classes where the presented method achieves classification rates ranging from 72.7 for the case of one training sample per class up to 97.2 when nine training samples per class are used. We present a vision-based approach to ancient coins’ identification. The approach is a two-stage procedure. In the first stage an invariant shape description of the coin edge is computed and matching based on shape is performed. The second stage uses preselection by the first stage in order to refine the matching using local descriptors. Results for different descriptors and coin sides are combined using naive Bayesian fusion. Identification rates on a comprehensive data set of 2400 images of ancient coins are on the order of magnitude of 99 . In this paper, we build upon the idea of using robust dense correspondence estimation for exemplar-based image classification and adapt it to the problem of ancient coin classification. We thus account for the lack of available training data and demonstrate that the matching costs are a powerful dissimilarity metric to establish coin classification for training set sizes of one or two images per class. This is accomplished by using a flexible dense correspondence search which is highly insensitive to local spatial differences between coins of the same class and different coin rotations between images. Additionally, we introduce a coarse-to-fine classification scheme to decrease runtime which would be otherwise linear to the number of classes in the training set. For evaluation, a new dataset representing 60 coin classes of the Roman Republican period is used. The proposed system achieves a classification rate of 83.3 and a runtime improvement of 93 through the coarse-to-fine classification. Classification of coins is an important but laborious aspect of numismatics - the field that studies coins and currency. It is particularly challenging in the case of ancient coins. Due to the way they were manufactured, as well as wear from use and exposure to chemicals in the soil, the same ancient coin type can exhibit great variability in appearance. We demonstrate that geometry-free models of appearance do not perform better than chance on this task and that only a small improvement is gained by previously proposed models of combined appearance and geometry. Thus, our first major contribution is a new type of feature which is efficient in terms of computational time and storage requirements, and which effectively captures geometric configurations between descriptors corresponding to local features. Our second contribution is a description of a fully automatic system based on the proposed features, which robustly localizes, segments out and classifies coins from cluttered images. We also describe a large database of ancient coins that we collected and which will be made publicly available. Finally, we report the results of empirical comparison of different coin matching techniques. The features proposed in this paper are found to greatly outperform existing methods.