Improving Ancient Roman Coin Recognition with Alignment and Spatial Encoding

Jongpil Kim, Vladimir Pavlovic

Abstract: Roman coins play an important role to understand the Roman empire because they convey rich information about key historical events of the time. Moreover, as large amounts of coins are daily traded over the Internet, it becomes necessary to develop automatic coin recognition systems to prevent illegal trades. In this paper, we describe a new large annotated database of over 2800 Roman coin images and propose an effective automated system for recognition of coins that leverages this new coin image set. As the use of succinct spatial-appearance relationships is critical for accurate coin recognition, we suggest two competing methods, adapted for the coin domain, to accomplish this task.