Efficient High-Resolution Template Matching with Vector Quantized Nearest Neighbour Fields

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient vector quantization approach for high-resolution template matching that reduces computational complexity and improves performance in challenging scenarios like occlusions and appearance variations.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel vector quantization technique combined with filtering in NN fields to enhance efficiency and accuracy in high-resolution template matching.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art performance on low-resolution data

Outperforms previous methods at higher resolution

Reduces NN computation complexity significantly

Abstract

Template matching is a fundamental problem in computer vision with applications in fields including object detection, image registration, and object tracking. Current methods rely on nearest-neighbour (NN) matching, where the query feature space is converted to NN space by representing each query pixel with its NN in the template. NN-based methods have been shown to perform better in occlusions, appearance changes, and non-rigid transformations; however, they scale poorly with high-resolution data and high feature dimensions. We present an NN-based method which efficiently reduces the NN computations and introduces filtering in the NN fields (NNFs). A vector quantization step is introduced before the NN calculation to represent the template with $k$ features, and the filter response over the NNFs is used to compare the template and query distributions over the features. We show that state-of-the-art performance is achieved in low-resolution data, and our method outperforms previous methods at higher resolution.