On Ancient Coin Classification

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. The first step of a computer aided system is the segmentation of the coin in the image. Next, a feature extraction process measures the coin in order to describe the coin unambiguously. In this paper, we focus on the segmentation task, followed by a comparison of features relevant for coin classification. Results of the algorithms implemented are presented for an image database of ancient coins.