M. W. Spratling

Bo Gao, M. W. Spratling

Finding a template in a search image is an important task underlying many computer vision applications. Recent approaches perform template matching in a deep feature-space, produced by a convolutional neural network (CNN), which is found to provide more tolerance to changes in appearance. In this article we investigate if enhancing the CNN's encoding of shape information can produce more distinguishable features that improve the performance of template matching. This investigation results in a new template matching method that produces state-of-the-art results on a standard benchmark. To confirm these results we also create a new benchmark and show that the proposed method also outperforms existing techniques on this new dataset. Our code and dataset is available at: https://github.com/iminfine/Deep-DIM.

M. W. Spratling

Recognising and locating image patches or sets of image features is an important task underlying much work in computer vision. Traditionally this has been accomplished using template matching. However, template matching is notoriously brittle in the face of changes in appearance caused by, for example, variations in viewpoint, partial occlusion, and non-rigid deformations. This article tests a method of template matching that is more tolerant to such changes in appearance and that can, therefore, more accurately identify image patches. In traditional template matching the comparison between a template and the image is independent of the other templates. In contrast, the method advocated here takes into account the evidence provided by the image for the template at each location and the full range of alternative explanations represented by the same template at other locations and by other templates. Specifically, the proposed method of template matching is performed using a form of probabilistic inference known as "explaining away". The algorithm used to implement explaining away has previously been used to simulate several neurobiological mechanisms, and been applied to image contour detection and pattern recognition tasks. Here it is applied for the first time to image patch matching, and is shown to produce superior results in comparison to the current state-of-the-art methods.