Fast and Optimal Binary Template Matching Application to Manga Copyright Protection

Template matching is a technique used in classifying an object by comparing portions of images with another image. Finding a given template in an image is typically performed by scanning the image and evaluating the similarity with the template. When the scanning is concerned with the entire image template matching is optimal. This paper considers a special case of template matching where the templates are binary. Although binary template matching has been studied extensively since the early days of pattern recognition, this technique seems not longer in use in Document Image Analysis (DIA). The major reasons arête time complexity, the no-invariance to scale and rotation and the lack of adaptability of similarity measures. However, different contributions have been investigated during the last years to improve these aspects: robustness and discrimination capability of similarity measures, their characterization, time-processing optimization with hardware support, etc. In this paper, we will review first some of the recent issues about binary template matching. We will present then a system exploiting bitwise operators and parallel processing supporting fast and accurate binary template matching for Manga copyright protection. This system is compared to a FFT-based template matching, and it outperforms both in processing-time and detection accuracy.