The design of efficient algorithms for two-dimensional pattern matching

The two-dimensional pattern matching problem finds the occurrences of a given two-dimensional pattern array in a two-dimensional text array. The paper presents two efficient algorithms, which combine Fan-Su (1993) and Aho-Corasick (1979) string search algorithms, to solve this problem. The proposed algorithms need not inspect each character of the text array during the pattern matching in most cases. Additionally, unlike the algorithms proposed by Zhu and Takaoka (1989) which are based on the hashing method, these new algorithms require no preprocessing of the text array. A comparison of the performance of various algorithms is presented. The result shows that the proposed algorithms are about three to six times faster than the best algorithm proposed previously when the size of the pattern array is less than 1/100 of the size of the text array, which occurs frequently in many applications