A Novel Convolutional Neural Network for Classifying Indian Coins by Denomination

Abstract

Coins recognition systems have humungous applications from vending and slot machines to banking and management firms which directly translate to a high volume of research regarding the development of methods for such classification. In recent years, academic research has shifted towards a computer vision approach for sorting coins due to the advancement in the field of deep learning. However, most of the documented work utilizes what is known as ‘Transfer Learning’ in which we reuse a pre-trained model of a fixed architecture as a starting point for our training. While such an approach saves us a lot of time and effort, the generic nature of the pre-trained model can often become a bottleneck for performance on a specialized problem such as coin classification. This study develops a convolutional neural network (CNN) model from scratch and tests it against a widely-used general-purpose architecture known as Googlenet. We have shown in this study by comparing the performance of our model with that of Googlenet (documented in various previous studies) that a more straightforward and specialized architecture is more optimal than a more complex general architecture for the coin classification problem. The model developed in this study is trained and tested on 720 and 180 images of Indian coins of different denominations, respectively. The final accuracy gained by the model is 91.62% on the training data, while the accuracy is 90.55% on the validation data.