Road Traffic Monitoring from Aerial Images Using Template Matching and Invariant Features

Road traffic monitoring is an imperative topic widely discussed among researchers.Systems used to monitor traffic frequently rely on cameras mounted on bridges or roadsides.However,aerial images provide the flexibility to use mobile platforms to detect the location and motion of the vehicle over a larger area.To this end,different models have shown the ability to recognize and track vehicles.However,these methods are not mature enough to produce accurate results in complex road scenes.Therefore,this paper presents an algorithm that combines state-of-the-art techniques for identifying and tracking vehicles in conjunction with image bursts.The extracted frames were converted to grayscale,followed by the application of a georeferencing algorithm to embed coordinate information into the images.The masking technique eliminated irrelevant data and reduced the computational cost of the overall monitoring system.Next,Sobel edge detection combined with Canny edge detection and Hough line transform has been applied for noise reduction.After preprocessing,the blob detection algorithm helped detect the vehicles.Vehicles of varying sizes have been detected by implementing a dynamic thresholding scheme.Detection was done on the first image of every burst.Then,to track vehicles,the model of each vehicle was made to find its matches in the succeeding images using the template matching algorithm.To further improve the tracking accuracy by incorporating motion information,Scale Invariant Feature Transform(SIFT)features have been used to find the best possible match among multiple matches.An accuracy rate of 87%for detection and 80%accuracy for tracking in the A1 Motorway Netherland dataset has been achieved.For the Vehicle Aerial Imaging from Drone(VAID)dataset,an accuracy rate of 86%for detection and 78%accuracy for tracking has been achieved.

Efficient Scalable Template-Matching Technique for Ancient Brahmi Script Image

Analysis and recognition of ancient scripts is a challenging task as these scripts are inscribed on pillars,stones,or leaves.Optical recognition systems can help in preserving,sharing,and accelerate the study of the ancient scripts,but lack of standard dataset for such scripts is a major constraint.Although many scholars and researchers have captured and uploaded inscription images on various websites,manual searching,downloading and extraction of these images is tedious and error prone.Web search queries return a vast number of irrelevant results,and manually extracting images for a specific script is not scalable.This paper proposes a novelmultistage system to identify the specific set of script images from a large set of images downloaded from web sources.The proposed system combines the two most important pattern matching techniques-Scale Invariant Feature Transform(SIFT)and Template matching,in a sequential pipeline,and by using the key strengths of each technique,the system can discard irrelevant images while retaining a specific type of images.

A color based face detection system using multiple templates

A color based system using multiple templates was developed and implem ented for detecting human faces in color images. The algorithm consists of three image processing steps. The first step is human skin color statistics. Then it separates skin regions from non-skin regions. After that, it locates the fronta l human face(s) within the skin regions. In the first step, 250 skin samples from persons of different ethnicities are used to determine the color distribution o f human skin in chromatic color space in order to get a chroma chart showing lik elihoods of skin colors. This chroma chart is used to generate, from the origina l color image, a gray scale image whose gray value at a pixel shows its likelih ood of representing the skin. The algorithm uses an adaptive thresholding proces s to achieve the optimal threshold value for dividing the gray scale image into separate skin regions from non skin regions. Finally, multiple face templates ma tching is used to determine if a given skin region represents a frontal human fa ce or not. Test of the system with more than 400 color images showed that the re sulting detection rate was 83%, which is better than most color-based face dete c tion systems. The average speed for face detection is 0.8 second/image (400×300 pixels) on a Pentium 3 (800MHz) PC.

Chip Surface Character Recognition Based on OpenCV

Chip surface character recognition is an important part of quality inspection in the field of microelectronics manufacturing.By recognizing the character information on the chip,automated production,quality control,and data collection and analysis can be achieved.This article studies a chip surface character recognition method based on the OpenCV vision library.Firstly,the obtained chip images are preprocessed.Secondly,the template matching method is used to locate the chip position.In addition,the surface characters on the chip are individually segmented,and each character image is extracted separately.Finally,a Support Vector Machine(SVM)is used to classify and recognize characters.The results show that this method can accurately recognize the surface characters of chips and meet the requirements of chip quality inspection.

An effective method for laboratory acoustic emission detection and location using template matching

In this paper, a template matching and location method, which has been rapidly adopted in microseismic research in recent years, is applied to laboratory acoustic emission(AE) monitoring. First, we used traditional methods to detect P-wave first motions and locate AE hypocenters in three dimensions. In addition, we selected events located with sufficient accuracy(normally corresponding AE events of relatively larger energy, showing clear P-wave first motion and a higher signal-to-noise ratio in most channels) as template events. Then, the template events were used to scan and match other poorly located events in triggered event records or weak events in continuous records. Through crosscorrelation of the multi-channel waveforms between the template and the event to be detected, the weak signal was detected and located using a grid-searching algorithm(with the grid centered at the template hypocenter). In order to examine the performance of the approach, we calibrated the proposed method using experimental data of different rocks and different types of experiments. The results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the detection capability and location accuracy, and can be applied to various laboratory and in situ experiments, which use multi-channel AE monitoring with waveforms recorded in either triggering or continuous mode.

TEMPLATE MATCHING ALGORITHM OF RADAR BEAM SCAN TYPE RECOGNITION

Phased array radar has been applied broadly because of its sound performance.But signal of phased array radar is of a wide variety of types.Therefore,recognition of phased array radar is the most puzzling aspect of the whole emitter identification domain.To solve the problem,the article proposes the method that identifies phased array radar by pulse amplitude information,and studies the phased array radar,models transmit signal of them,and receiving signal by radar countermeasure reconnaissance receiver.From constructing template of pulse train's amplitude vector of mechanical scanning radar,computing distance of samples and standard template,finding threshold of the template matching arithmetic,the article puts forward the template matching algorithm of radar beam scan type recognition to identify phased array radar automatically.

Template matching for simple waveforms with low signal-to-noise ratio and its application to icequake detection

Template matching is a useful method to detect seismic events through waveform similarity between two signals.The traditional template matching method works well in detecting small tectonic earthquakes.However,the method has some difficulty when the signals have relatively low signal-to-noise ratios(SNRs)and simple shapes,e.g.a sinusoidal function.In this study,we modify the traditional template matching approach for this situation.We first construct a virtual three-component seismic station using vertical-component waveforms recorded by three stations.Next,we select a template event from the virtual station,and apply the traditional template matching.We then verify this method by detecting icequakes with simple waveforms on the Urumqi Glacier No.1 and compare the results with those from the short-term-averages over long-term-average(STA/LTA),the REST method,and traditional template matching method.It can be concluded that the modified template matching method using virtual stations has some advantages for seismic data with low SNRs.

Research on the measurement of belt speed by video in coal mine based on improved template matching algorithm

In order to improve the intelligence of video monitoring system of belt and make up the deficiency of higher failure rate and bad real-time performance in the traditional systems of measurement of belt speed, according to the fact that the light of coal mine is uneven, the strength of light changes greatly, the direction of belt movement is constant, and the position of camera was fixed, various algorithms of speed measurement by video were studied, and algorithm for template matching based on sum of absolute differences （SAD） and correlation coefficient was proposed and improved, besides, the tracking of feature regions was realized. Then, a camera calibration method using the invariance of the cross-ratio was adopted and the real-time measurement of belt speed by the hardware platform based on DM642 was realized. Finally, experiment results show that this method not only has advantages of high precision and strong anti-jamming capability but also can real-time reflect the changes of belt speed, so it has a comprehensive applicability.

SYMBOL-RATE ESTIMATION BASED ON TEMPLATE MATCHING RULES

For non-cooperative communication, the symbol-rate estimation of digital communication signal is an important problem to be solved. In this letter, A new algorithm for the symbol-rate estimation of single-tone digitally modulated signal (i.e. MPSK/QAM) is proposed. Firstly a section from the received signal is cut as the template, and then the signal is matched sectionwise by making use of the signal selfsimilarity. So a signal con- taining the information of symbol jumping is got, and the symbol-rate can be estimated by DFT (Discrete Fou- rier Transformation). The validity of the new method has been verified by experiments.

Hierarchical Template Matching for Robust Visual Tracking with Severe Occlusions

To tackle the problem of severe occlusions in visual tracking, we propose a hierarchical template-matching method based on a layered appearance model. This model integrates holistic- and part-region matching in order to locate an object in a coarse-to-fine manner. Furthermore, in order to reduce ambiguity in object localization, only the discriminative parts of an object＇ s appearance template are chosen for similarity computing with respect to their cornerness measurements. The similarity between parts is computed in a layer-wise manner, and from this, occlusions can be evaluated. When the object is partly occluded, it can be located accurately by matching candidate regions with the appearance template. When it is completely occluded, its location can be predicted from its historical motion information using a Kalman filter. The proposed tracker is tested on several practical image sequences, and the experimental results show that it can consistently provide accurate object location for stable tracking, even for severe occlusions.

Parallel Implementation of the Non-Overlapping Template Matching Test Using CUDA

NIST(National Institute of Standards and Technology) statistical test recognized as the most authoritative is widely used in verifying the randomness of binary sequences. The Non-overlapping Template Matching Test as the 7 th test of the NIST Test Suit is remarkably time consuming and the slow performance is one of the major hurdles in the testing process. In this paper, we present an efficient bit-parallel matching algorithm and segmented scan-based strategy for execution on Graphics Processing Unit(GPU) using NVIDIA Compute Unified Device Architecture(CUDA). Experimental results show the significant performance improvement of the parallelized Non-overlapping Template Matching Test, the running speed is 483 times faster than the original NIST implementation without attenuating the test result accuracy.

A Template Matching Based Feature Extraction for Activity Recognition

Human activity recognition(HAR)can play a vital role in the monitoring of human activities,particularly for healthcare conscious individuals.The accuracy of HAR systems is completely reliant on the extraction of prominent features.Existing methods find it very challenging to extract optimal features due to the dynamic nature of activities,thereby reducing recognition performance.In this paper,we propose a robust feature extraction method for HAR systems based on template matching.Essentially,in this method,we want to associate a template of an activity frame or sub-frame comprising the corresponding silhouette.In this regard,the template is placed on the frame pixels to calculate the equivalent number of pixels in the template correspondent those in the frame.This process is replicated for the whole frame,and the pixel is directed to the optimum match.The best count is estimated to be the pixel where the silhouette(provided via the template)presented inside the frame.In this way,the feature vector is generated.After feature vector generation,the hiddenMarkovmodel(HMM)has been utilized to label the incoming activity.We utilized different publicly available standard datasets for experiments.The proposed method achieved the best accuracy against existing state-of-the-art systems.

Fingerprints Matching Based on the Integrated Template

Traditional fingerprints matching approaches are based on the minutiae and the texture characteristics. It is difficult for today's techniques to deal with the images captured by the solid-state fingerprint sensors because the sampling area of these sensors is very small and only portion of the fingerprint can be obtained. In this paper, a novel integrated template has been built using several images and combining the minutiae with the texture characteristics at the same time. By using a kind of Gabor filters (eight directions) on the region around the reliable minutiae, local texture of each minutia termed as minutiacode is extracted. Further, a real-time matching algorithm using the integrated template is presented. The output is determined by the weight factor of the compound matching. Finally, experimental results show that this system performs well in reducing false reject rate (FRR).

Robust multi-sensor image matching based on normalized self-similarity region descriptor

Multi-modal image matching is crucial in aerospace applications because it can fully exploit the complementary and valuable information contained in the amount and diversity of remote sensing images.However,it remains a challenging task due to significant non-linear radiometric,geometric differences,and noise across different sensors.To improve the performance of heterologous image matching,this paper proposes a normalized self-similarity region descriptor to extract consistent structural information.We first construct the pointwise self-similarity region descriptor based on the Euclidean distance between adjacent image blocks to reflect the structural properties of multi-modal images.Then,a linear normalization approach is used to form Modality Independent Region Descriptor(MIRD),which can effectively distinguish structural features such as points,lines,corners,and flat between multi-modal images.To further improve the matching accuracy,the included angle cosine similarity metric is adopted to exploit the directional vector information of multi-dimensional feature descriptors.The experimental results show that the proposed MIRD has better matching accuracy and robustness for various multi-modal image matching than the state-of-the-art methods.MIRD can effectively extract consistent geometric structure features and suppress the influence of SAR speckle noise using non-local neighboring image blocks operation,effectively applied to various multi-modal image matching.

Up-Sampled Cross-Correlation Based Object Tracking & Vibration Measurement in Agriculture Tractor System

This research introduces a challenge in integrating and cleaning the data,which is a crucial task in object matching.While the object is detected and then measured,the vibration at different light intensities may influence the durability and reliability of mechanical systems or structures and cause problems such as damage,abnormal stopping,and disaster.Recent research failed to improve the accuracy rate and the computation time in tracking an object and in the vibration measurement.To solve all these problems,this proposed research simplifies the scaling factor determination by assigning a known real-world dimension to a predetermined portion of the image.A novel white color sticker of the known dimensions marked with a color dot is pasted on the surface of an object for the best result in the template matching using the Improved Up-Sampled Cross-Correlation(UCC)algorithm.The vibration measurement is calculated using the Finite-Difference Algorithm(FDA),a machine vision systemfitted with a macro lens sensor that is capable of capturing the image at a closer range,which does not affect the quality of displacement measurement from the video frames.Thefield test was conducted on the TAFE(Tractors and Farm Equipment Limited)tractor parts,and the percentage of error was recorded between 30%and 50%at very low vibration values close to zero,whereas it was recorded between 5%and 10%error in most high-accelerations,the essential range for vibration analysis.Finally,the suggested system is more suitable for measuring the vibration of stationary machinery having low frequency ranges.The use of a macro lens enables to capture of image frames at very close-ups.A 30%to 50%error percentage has been reported when the vibration amplitude is very small.Therefore,this study is not suitable for Nano vibration analysis.

Learning accurate template matching with differentiable coarseto-fine correspondence refinement

Template matching is a fundamental task in computer vision and has been studied for decades.It plays an essential role in manufacturing industry for estimating the poses of different parts,facilitating downstream tasks such as robotic grasping.Existing methods fail when the template and source images have different modalities,cluttered backgrounds,or weak textures.They also rarely consider geometric transformations via homographies,which commonly exist even for planar industrial parts.To tackle the challenges,we propose an accurate template matching method based on differentiable coarse-tofine correspondence refinement.We use an edge-aware module to overcome the domain gap between the mask template and the grayscale image,allowing robust matching.An initial warp is estimated using coarse correspondences based on novel structure-aware information provided by transformers.This initial alignment is passed to a refinement network using references and aligned images to obtain sub-pixel level correspondences which are used to give the final geometric transformation.Extensive evaluation shows that our method to be significantly better than state-of-the-art methods and baselines,providing good generalization ability and visually plausible results even on unseen real data.

A multiple template approach for robust tracking of fast motion target

Target tracking is very important in computer vision and related areas. It is usually difficult to accurately track fast motion target with appearance variations. Sometimes the tracking algorithms fail for heavy appearance variations. A multiple template method to track fast motion target with appearance changes is presented under the framework of appearance model with Kalman filter. Firstly, we construct a multiple template appearance model, which includes both the original template and templates affinely transformed from original one. Generally speaking, appearance variations of fast motion target can be covered by affine transformation. Therefore, the affine tr templates match the target of appearance variations better than conventional models. Secondly, we present an improved Kalman filter for approx- imate estimating the motion trail of the target and a modified similarity evaluation function for exact matching. The estimation approach can reduce time complexity of the algorithm and keep accuracy in the meantime. Thirdly, we propose an adaptive scheme for updating template set to alleviate the drift problem. The scheme considers the following differences： the weight differences in two successive frames; different types of affine transformation applied to templates. Finally, experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is robust to appearance varia- tion of fast motion target and achieves real-time performance on middle/low-range computing platform.

Recent advances in earthquake monitoring II: Emergence of next-generation intelligent systems

Seismic data processing techniques,together with seismic instrumentation,determine our earthquake monitoring capability and the quality of resulting earthquake catalogs.This paper is intended to review the improvement of earthquake monitoring capability from the perspective of data processing.Over the past two decades,seismologists have made considerable advancements in seismic data processing,partly thanks to the significant development of computational power,signal processing,and machine learning techniques.In particular,wide application of template matching and increasing use of deep learning significantly enhance our capability to extract signals of small earthquakes from noisy data.Relative location techniques provide a critical tool to elucidate fault geometries and seismicity migration patterns at unprecedented resolution.These techniques are becoming standard,leading to emerging intelligent software systems for next-generation earthquake monitoring.Prospective improvements in future research must consider the urgent needs in highly generalizable detection algorithms(for both permanent and temporary deployments)and in emergency real-time monitoring of ongoing sequences(e.g.,aftershock and induced seismicity sequences).We believe that the maturing of intelligent and high-resolution processing systems could transform traditional earthquake monitoring workflows and eventually liberate seismologists from laborious catalog construction tasks.

Image processing algorithm acceleration using reconfigurable macro processor model

The concept and advantage of reconfigurable technology is introduced. A kind of processor architecture of re configurable macro processor (RMP) model based on FPGA array and DSP is put forward and has been implemented. Two image algorithms are developed: template-based automatic target recognition and zone labeling. One is estimating for motion direction in the infrared image background, another is line picking-up algorithm based on image zone labeling and phase grouping technique. It is a kind of 'hardware' function that can be called by the DSP in high-level algorithm. It is also a kind of hardware algorithm of the DSP. The results of experiments show the reconfigurable computing technology based on RMP is an ideal accelerating means to deal with the high-speed image processing tasks. High real time performance is obtained in our two applications on RMP.

Automatic Recognition Method for Optical Measuring Instruments Based on Machine Vision

Based on a comprehensive study of various algorithms, the automatic recognition of traditional ocular optical measuring instruments is realized. Taking a universal tools microscope(UTM) lens view image as an example, a 2-layer automatic recognition model for data reading is established after adopting a series of pre-processing algorithms. This model is an optimal combination of the correlation-based template matching method and a concurrent back propagation(BP) neural network. Multiple complementary feature extraction is used in generating the eigenvectors of the concurrent network. In order to improve fault-tolerance capacity, rotation invariant features based on Zernike moments are extracted from digit characters and a 4-dimensional group of the outline features is also obtained. Moreover, the operating time and reading accuracy can be adjusted dy-namically by setting the threshold value. The experimental result indicates that the newly developed algorithm has optimal recognition precision and working speed. The average reading ratio can achieve 97.23%. The recognition method can automatically obtain the results of optical measuring instruments rapidly and stably without modifying their original structure, which meets the application requirements.