Ancient Coin Recognition Based on Spatial Coding

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 propose an automatic recognition method for ancient Roman coins. The proposed method exploits the structure of the coin by using a spatially local coding method. Results show that the proposed method outperforms traditional rigid spatial structure models such as the spatial pyramid.