On the relation of image restoration and template matching: application to block-matching motion estimation

In this paper, we investigate the relation between the image restoration and the template matching problems. We present a new formulation for template matching that establishes the duality between these two problems. According to this formulation the restored template is used to ascertain its location. An alternative formulation is also suggested which is based on the observation that template matching can be viewed as an image restoration problem where the degraded image is blurred by a linear point spread function-the template. It is shown that, unlike image restoration, all second order statistics required for the implementation of linear minimum mean-square error (LMMSE) template matching can be accurately estimated. LMMSE template matching is subsequently applied to the block-matching based motion estimation from degraded image sequences. Our experimental results indicate that LMMSE template matching is superior to traditional block-matching