Fast template matching system using VHDL

The Image template matching problem is one of the fundamental problems of and has many practical applications in image processing, pattern recognition, and computer vision. It is a useful operation for filtering, edge detection, image registration, and object detection. Template matching is the process of determining the presence and the location of a reference image of an object inside a scene image under analysis by a spatial cross-correlation process. Conventional cross-correlation type algorithms are computationally expensive. In this paper, a method of fast image template matching algorithm based on template modeling is proposed. Taken advantage of fast searching techniques, the method can achieve high computing efficiency and good matching results. Furthermore a comparison of the performance provided by this method and conventional matching algorithms is discussed. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is very effective. Simple hardware architecture is presented and implemented, where it executes matching for a 4 x 4 template on a 16 x 16 target image.