Automatic Coin Classification and Identification

We investigate object recognition and classification in a setting with a large number of classes as well as recognition and identification of individual objects of high similarity. Real-world data sets were obtained for the classification and identification tasks. The considered classification task is the discrimination of modern coins into several hundreds of different classes. Identification is investigated for hand-made ancient coins. Intra-class variance due to wear and abrasion vs. small inter-class variance makes the classification of modern coins challenging. For ancient coins the intra-class variance makes the identification task possible, as the appearance of individual hand-struck coins is unique. Figure 1 shows sample images for the considered collections of coins.