Rotation-discriminating template matching based on Fourier coefficients of radial projections with robustness to scaling and partial occlusion

We consider brightness/contrast-invariant and rotation-discriminating template matching that searches an image to analyze A for a query image Q. We propose to use the complex coefficients of the discrete Fourier transform of the radial projections to compute new rotation-invariant local features. These coefficients can be efficiently obtained via FFT. We classify templates in “stable” and “unstable” ones and argue that any local feature-based template matching may fail to find unstable templates. We extract several stable sub-templates of Q and find them in A by comparing the features. The matchings of the sub-templates are combined using the Hough transform. As the features of A are computed only once, the algorithm can find quickly many different sub-templates in A, and it is suitable for: finding many query images in A; multi-scale searching and partial occlusion-robust template matching.