BankNote-Net

Millions of people around the world have low or no vision. Assistive software applications have been developed for a variety of day-to-day tasks, including currency recognition. To aid with this task, we present BankNote-Net, an open dataset for assistive currency recognition. The dataset consists of a total of 24,816 embeddings of banknote images captured in a variety of assistive scenarios, spanning 17 currencies and 112 denominations. These compliant embeddings were learned using supervised contrastive learning and a MobileNetV2 architecture, and they can be used to train and test specialized downstream models for any currency, including those not covered by our dataset or for which only a few real images per denomination are available (few-shot learning). We deploy a variation of this model for public use in the last version of the Seeing AI app developed by Microsoft, which has over a 100 thousand monthly active users.