This paper presents a generic pre-processor for expediting conventional template matching techniques. Instead of locating the best matched patch in the reference image to a query template via exhaustive search, the proposed algorithm rules out regions with no possible matches with minimum computational efforts. While working on simple patch features, such as mean, variance and gradient, the fast pre-screening is highly discriminative. Its computational efficiency is gained by using a novel octagonal-star-shaped template and the inclusion-exclusion principle to extract and compare patch features. Moreover, it can handle arbitrary rotation and scaling of reference images effectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm greatly reduces the search space while never missing the best match.
 Template matching has many applications in signal processing, image processing, pattern recognition, and video compression. This paper proposes a fast coarse-to-fine template matching algorithm for finding the exact best match, i.e., the match that may be found by a full search. This is obtained by pruning the number of candidates in the full search using the results of a coarse search. Experimental results show that speed ups of a couple of orders of magnitude can easily be achieved using this method for typical low-noise cases of two-dimensional (2-D) template matching. This paper describes a method that accelerates pattern matching. The distance between a pattern and a window is usually close to the distance of the pattern to the adjacement windows due to image smoothness. We show how to exploit this fact to reduce the running time of pattern matching by adaptively sliding the window often by more than one pixel. The decision how much we can slide is based on a novel rank we define for each feature in the pattern. Implemented on a Pentium 4 3GHz processor, detection of a pattern with 7569 pixels in a 640 × 480 pixel image requires only 3.4ms.