A deep learning approach to classify country and value of modern coins

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to preserve and promote cultural heritage has experienced significant growth in recent years. Among the various areas of cultural heritage, numismatics have emerged as a particularly promising field where we can develop AI solutions. Numismatics refers to the study of coins, tokens, paper money, and medals, which play a critical role in understanding human history and culture. However, there are still limited resources available to help researchers and collectors in the identification of coins. This is due to the vast number of coins in circulation, which presents a significant challenge in developing smart tools for classification tasks. This paper aims to provide a contribution to this setting. In particular, we start by creating a new dataset called EURO-Coin, which consists of images showing the side of coins with reliefs and is designed to facilitate the training and testing of AI models for euro coin classification. Then, we propose two approaches that leverage Convolutional Neural Networks and self-attention layers to classify the country and value of the coins. In our experiments, we obtain an accuracy of 86.9% for country classification and an accuracy of 96.4% for value classification. Finally, we conduct an ablation study to evaluate the impact of the preprocessing activities and attention layers in our approaches.