Very fast template matching

Template matching by normalized correlations is a common technique for determine the existence and compute the location of a shape within an image. In many cases the run time of computer vision applications is dominated by repeated computation of template matching, applied to locate multiple templates in varying scale and orientation. A straightforward implementation of template matching for an image size n and a template size k requires order of kn operations. There are fast algorithms that require order of n log n operations. We describe a new approximation scheme that requires order n operations. It is based on the idea of "Integral-Images", recently introduced by Viola and Jones.