According to the Call, priority 3.6 "The protection of cultural heritage and associated conservation strategies", Task 2 "To enable the traceability of cultural heritage objects" the project will focus on technologies aimed at allowing permanent identification and traceability of coins, and will devise strategies to facilitate prevention and repression of illicit trade of stolen ones. Thus it will include: a) documentation and inventory methodologies based on international standards b) coin automatic recognition tools, based on images c) automated search tools. It must be noted that strategies based on physical marks on the surface of the object (such as those used on the back of paintings, or below the base of sculptures, or on less important parts of archaeological objects as the interior of ancient vases) are unacceptable for coins, whose surface can be altered in no way.

 

Traceability is therefore based only on visual inspection, since every individual coin has signs (caused by minting techniques for pre-industrial ones or by use-wear for more recent ones) that make it unique and recognisable to an expert's eye. Weight and measures are additional recognition aids. Coins are unique, under this regard, among cultural objects. Hence an identification and traceability strategy can only rely on the availability of inventories and the effectiveness of recognition. On the other hand, once passive security systems (such as alarms and safes) have been defeated and coins have been stolen, fighting against their illicit trade must allow identification of stolen items among the incredibly vast number of those being offered for sale, by antiquity traders, at auctions or in the Internet.

 

An estimate of the size of the market is given by the fact that searching for "coin trade" on the Internet returns several million hits: this shows that automatic, unsupervised search tools are greatly needed. Forecast use scenarios consist, for example, in the following two: 1) a known stolen coin is searched on the market: here the details of the desired object are well known (e.g. basing on the police report), and they are compared with the diverse information available on many others looking for matching; 2) an unknown suspect coin (e.g. found during a police or customs operation) needs to be rapidly identified and checked against the police database of stolen ones. Consequently, the scientific and technological objectives of the project are the following.