Efficient Algorithms for Image Template and Dictionary Matching

  • Authors:
  • Sung-Hyuk Cha

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science and Engineering, State University of New York at Buffalo. scha@cse.buffalo.edu

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Given a large text image and a small template image, the Template Matching Problem is that of finding every location within the text which looks like the pattern. This problem, which has received attention for low-level image processing, has been formalizedby defining a distance metric between arrays of pixels and finding allsubarrays of the large image which are within some threshold distanceof the template. These so-called metric methods tends to be tooslow for many applications, since evaluating the distance function cantake too much time.We present a method for quickly eliminating most positions of thetext from consideration as possible matches. The remainingcandidate positions are then evaluated one by one against thetemplate for a match. We are still guaranteed to find allmatching positions, and our method gives significant speed-ups. Finally, we consider the problem of matching a dictionary oftemplates against a text. We present methods which are much fasterthan matching the templates individually against the input image.