Discovering characteristic landmarks on ancient coins using convolutional networks

摘要

We propose a method to find characteristic landmarks and recognize ancient Roman imperial coins using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) combined with expert-designed domain hierarchies. We first propose a framework to recognize Roman coins that exploits the hierarchical knowledge structure embedded in the coin domain, which we combine with the CNN-based category classifiers. We next formulate an optimization problem to discover class-specific salient coin regions. Analysis of discovered salient regions confirms that they are largely consistent with human expert annotations. Experimental results show that the proposed framework is able to effectively recognize ancient Roman coins as well as successfully identify landmarks on the coins. For this research, we have collected a Roman coin dataset where all coins are annotated and consist of obverse (head) and reverse (tail) images. (C) 2016 SPIE and IS&T