Development of template matching hardware and its high‐speed processing strategy

The template matching technique is now applied to tracking of outdoor object and position measurement, and there is increasing demand for application of template matching based on the normalized correlation coefficient, which is robust against the variation of illumination. In order to apply the technique based on the normalization technique to practical application problems, however, high-speed calculation of the normalized correlation coefficient is required. This paper intends to improve the speed by implementing by hardware the calculation of the normalized correlation coefficient, which requires a large amount of computation. The proposed method decomposes the normalized correlation coefficient calculation into five operational components, each of which is implementated by hardware. The speed of processing is improved being combined with a parallel processing with a high degree of freedom based on the local property owned by the template matching process. For further improvement of the speed, the application of the pyramid structure is considered. Hardware that can handle the pyramid structure is realized. An evaluation was tried using an actual machine. The performance of the developed hardware is evaluated. The effectiveness of the approach is verified by applying the method to the traffic flow measurement system, as an example of an actual outdoor system. © 2001 Scripta Technica, Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 84(11): 1–10, 2001