Numismatics deals with various historical aspects of the phenomenon money. Fundamental part of a numismatists work is the identification and classification of coins according to standard reference books. The recognition of ancient coins is a highly complex task that requires years of experience in the entire field of numismatics. To date, no optical recognition system for ancient coins has been investigated successfully. In this paper, we present an extension and combination of local image descriptors relevant for ancient coin recognition. Interest points are detected and their appearance is described by local descriptors. Coin recognition is based on the selection of similar images based on feature matching. Experiments are presented for a database containing ancient coin images demonstrating the feasibility of our approach.

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