Many years ago, I took up coin collecting as a hobby for a few years. At that time, evaluating coins was done with a magnifying glass and the trained eyes of a coin dealer, who could spot details that either rendered the coin either almost worthless or something worth holding on to.
Fast forward to 2019, and two researchers at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland have developed a machine learning-based method for understanding images of ancient coins, according to story on Tech Xplore. “My research in this field was a product of bringing two passions together: my ongoing interest in ancient coins (I have a large collection myself) and the state of the art in AI,” Ognjen Arandjelovic, one of the study’s researchers, was quoted as saying in the TechXplore. “In 2010, I wrote a paper on the topic and to my surprise, as this is typically a niche interest, it attracted a lot of attention.”
Most previous studies have tried to better understand ancient coins using generic object recognition techniques. Arandjelovic’s knowledge and understanding of ancient numismatics, led him to develop alternative methods. Over the past decade or so, he has published a series of papers that evaluate coins using different methods.
Arandjelovic and his colleague Jessica Cooper set out to develop a more effective approach, which can describe a coin like a human would to another human. “The —work with Jessica came from my realization that the field has been taking a very wrong angle of trying to determine whether two coins are the same,” he explains in the article. “The reason for this stems from the fact that few ancient coin types (relative to the tens of thousands minted during the five centuries of Roman Empire) which has been imaged is rather small, making the approach of little practical importance. Jessica and I thus thought that it would have been much better if the computer could describe the coin, much as a human would to another human.”
“I’m broadly interested in algorithms that mimic the way humans approach tasks,” Cooper was quoted as saying in the report. “When an expert describes an ancient coin, she identifies artistically depicted concepts in the same way that our system does, by recognizing shapes in the image. She is also capable of pointing to the elements she is describing: ‘there is a cornucopia’, ‘there is a shield’ etc. Our system also does this.”
