The COINS project aims at providing a substantial contribution to the fight against illegal trade and theft of coins which appears to be a major part of the illegal antiques market. The project will develop standardized inventories by defining a domain ontology based on CIDOC-CRM, the standard ontology for Cultural Heritage, and a multilingual thesaurus. Data management tools will be created as well, and a specialized web search tool. The recognition of coins will be based on new algorithms of pattern recognition and image processing, in a field (classification and identification of ancient coins) as yet unexplored.

The main contribution of PRIP to the project is to perform the coin detection and coin recognition task.
This project will be performed in cooperation with:

• PIN scrl – Servizi Didattici e Scientifici per l’Università di Firenze, VAST Lab (Italy)
• Arma dei Carabinieri – Comando Tutela Patrimonio Culturale (Italy)
• Soprintendenza Archeologica di Roma (Italy)
• Muzeul National de Istorie a României, Coin Department (Romania)
• The Fitzwilliam Museum (United Kingdom)
• VARTEC (Belgium)
• ARC Seibersdorf Research GmbH, High Performance Image Processing (Austria)

Publications

Martin Kampel, Maia Zaharieva: Optical recognition of medieval coins. 35th Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA’07), Berlin, Germany, 2007.

Maia Zaharieva, Martin Kampel, Sebastian Zambanini: Image based recognition of coins – An Overview of the COINS project. 31st AAPR/OAGM Workshop, Krumbach, Austria, pp.57–64, 2007.

Hubert Mara, Martin Kampel, Franco Niccolucci and Robert Sablatnig: Ancient Coins & Ceramics – 3D and 2D Documentation for preservation and retrieval of lost heritage. In Proc. of the 2nd ISPRS Intl. Workshop on 3D Virtual Reconstruction and Visualization of Complex Architectures (3D-ARCH’07), vol. XXXVI-5/W47 of International Archives of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, pp. 10-18, 2007.

Maia Zaharieva, Martin Kampel, Sebastian Zambanini: Image based recognition of ancient coins. 12th International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (CAIP’07), Vienna, Austria, pp. 547–554, 2007.

Maia Zaharieva, Martin Kampel, Klaus Vondrovec: From manual to automated optical recognition of ancient coins. 13th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia (VSMM’07), Brisbane, Australia, pp. 88-99, 2007.

Maia Zaharieva, Reinhold Huber-Mörk, Michael Nölle, Martin Kampel: On ancient coin classification. 8th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage (VAST’07), Brighton, UK, pp. 55-62, 2007.

Sebastian Zambanini, Martin Kampel: Segmentation of Ancient Coins Based on Local  Entropy and Gray Value Range.  13th Computer Vision Winter Workshop (CVWW’08), Moravske Toplice, Slovenia, pp. 9-16, 2008.

Martin Kampel, Sebastian Zambanini: Coin Data Acquisition for Image Recognition, accepted at 36th Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA’08), Budapest, Hungary, 2008.

Martin Kampel, Klaus Vondrovec, Maia Zaharieva, Sebastian Zambanini: Image-Based Classification of Ancient Coins, 14th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia – Project Papers (VSMM’08), Limassol, Cyprus, pp. 341-349, 2008.

Reinhold Huber-Mörk, Maia Zahrieva: Object identification using fusion of shape and local descriptors, Proc. of the International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC’08), Part II, pp. 368-379, 2008

Martin Kampel, Maia Zaharieva: Recognizing ancient coins based on local features, Proc. of the 4th International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC’08), Part I, pp. 11-22, 2008.

Martin Kampel: Computer aided analysis of ancient coins: EVA conference on Digital Cultural Heritage – Essential for Tourism (EVA’08), Vienna, Austria, pp. 137–144, 2008

Christian Kotz: OCR methods applied to images of historical coins: EVA conference on Digital Cultural Heritage – Essential for Tourism (EVA’08), Vienna, Austria, pp. 127–136, 2008

Sebastian Zambanini, Martin Kampel, Mario Schlapke: On the Use of Computer Vision for Numismatic Research, Proc. of International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage (VAST’08), Braga, Portugal, pp. 17-24, 2008.

Sebastian Zambanini, Martin Kampel: Robust Automatic Segmentation of Ancient Coins, Proc. of the 4th International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (VISAPP’09), Lisbon, Portugal, Vol. 1, pp. 273-276, 2009.

Martin Kampel, Reinhold Huber-Mörk and Maia Zaharieva. Image-Based Retrieval and Identification of Ancient Coins. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 24(2):26-34, Mar./Apr. 2009.

Sebastian Zambanini, Mario Schlapke, Martin Kampel, Andreas Müller: Historical Coins in 3D: Acquisition and Numismatic Applications 10th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage (VAST’09), St. Julians, Malta,  pp. 49-52, 2009.

Media Coverage

Keine zwei Münzen gleichen einander zu 100 Prozent, Die Presse, Austria, 20 Feb 2008

Detailed Information

• Website: http://www.coins-project.eu