The First Stage in Two-Stage Template Matching

This paper formulates the problem encountered in the first stage of two-stage, binary template matching as a set of hypotheses to be tested, including a hypothesis of ``no object.´´ Two new statistics R and G are proposed, based on a likelihood ratio, and are compared to the sum of absolute differences and a correlation measure by analytical approximations and Monte Carlo experiments. Statistical power and a measure of sensitivity to the true location of the object are the criteria. Parameters are the numbers of 1´s in object and image, subtemplate size, and parameters reflecting intensity distortion between template and object. One of the proposed statistics R is much more computationally intensive than the other G. Although R is more powerful than G and the other statistics, G is generally more sensitive to the true object location. Statistic G is also more powerful than the sum of absolute differences and correlation. All statistics are robust to incomplete knowledge of distortion parameters. Experiments on Landsat images confirm the sensitivity of G and recommend it for application in the first stage.