Template matching by normalized correlations is a common technique for determine the existence and compute the location of
a shape within an image. In many cases the run time of computer vision applications is dominated by repeated computation of
template matching, applied to locate multiple templates in varying scale and orientation. A straightforward implementation
of template matching for an image size n and a template size k requires order of kn operations. There are fast algorithms that require order of n log n operations. We describe a new approximation scheme that requires order n operations. It is based on the idea of “Integral-Images”, recently introduced by Viola and Jones.
This material is based in part upon work supported by the Texas Advanced Research Program under Grant No. 009741-0074-1999
and the Texas Advanced Technology Program under Grant No. 009741-0042-2001