A Novel Template Matching Scheme for Fast Full-Search Boosted by an Integral Image

A new template matching method accelerated by an integral image is proposed. In contrast to the conventional winner-update template matching algorithm, the proposed scheme uses an integral image instead of a block sum pyramid to represent the search area. When an integral image is used, block sums on the lowest level are evaluated very fast. As a result, the speed with which nonbest candidates are rejected is nearly double that of the conventional scheme. Moreover, the proposed scheme needs less memory than the conventional approach to maintain block sums of candidates and can be easily extended to nonsquare (rectangular) template matching.