New method for subpixel image matching with rotation invariance by combining the parametric template method and the ring projection transform process

Yi-Hsien Lin Chin-Hsing Chen Chih-Cheng Wei National Cheng Kung University Department of Electrical Engineering Tainan, 701, Taiwan, ROC E-mail: [email protected] Abstract. The need for accurate and efficient computation of template matching prevails in many applications. However, a challenge in template matching is to obtain high accuracy that involves acceptable computation complexity and is robust to rotation. A new subpixel template matching approach that combines the parametric template method and the ring projection transform process is proposed. It not only achieves subpixel accuracy in location, but also offers rotation invariance in the subpixel template matching. Furthermore, our approach is conceptually simple, easy to implement, and very efficient because no iterative steps are involved. The simulated results show that our approach enjoys very high precision in the presence of image rotations. Experiments with realworld scenes demonstrate that the proposed method can reach subpixel accuracy for finding the distance between two target objects in the presence of rotations and translations. This indicates that our approach is suitable for accurate on-line template matching with scene rotations and translations. © 2006 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. DOI: 10.1117/1.2213609