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 earlier work on coin classification approaches targeted modern-day coins, which is comparably straightforward since the use of modern technology for coin manufacturing ensures a uniform visual appearance concerning shape, depictions, and legend on the obverse and reverse sides. As a result, relatively simple image analysis schemes based on traditional approaches @cite_35 @cite_3 @cite_46 achieved notable classification rates on modern coin datasets with as much as 2270 coin classes. Despite their success on modern coins, these approaches were shown to perform poorly on the task of ancient coin classification @cite_8 . As a remedy, attempts on ancient coin classification incorporated additional analysis on visual depictions such as portrait recognition @cite_25 , object recognition @cite_19 @cite_34 , and legend recognition @cite_18 .
@cite_35 @cite_18 @cite_8 @cite_3 @cite_19 @cite_46 @cite_34 @cite_25
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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. Illegal trade and theft of coins appears to be a major part of the illegal antiques market. Image based recognition of coins could substantially contribute to fight against it. Central component in the permanent identification and traceability of coins is the underlying classification and identification technology. However, currently available algorithms focus basically on the recognition of modern coins. To date, no optical recognition system for ancient coins has been researched successfully. In this paper, we give an overview on recent research for coin classification and we show if existing approaches can be extended from modern coins to ancient coins. Results of the algorithms implemented are presented for three different coins databases with more then 10.000 coins. We propose a holistic system to classify ancient Roman Republican coins based on their reverse-side motifs. The bag-of-visual-words (BoW) model is enriched with spatial information to increase the discriminative power of the coin image representation. This is achieved by combining a spatial pooling scheme with co-occurrence encoding of visual words. We specifically address the required geometric invariance properties of image-based ancient coin classification, as coins from different collections can be located at differing image locations, have various scales in the images and can undergo various in-plane rotations. We evaluate our method on a data set of 2,224 coin images from three different sources. The experimental results show that our proposed image representation is more discriminative than the traditional bag-of-visual-words model while still being invariant to the mentioned geometric transformations. For 29 motifs, the system achieves a classification rate of 82 . It is considered to act as a helpful tool for numismatists in the near future, which facilitates and supports the traditional coin classification process by a faster presorting of coins. 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 .