opencv template matching

OpenCV comes with a function cv2.matchTemplate() for this purpose

Note

If you are using cv2.TM_SQDIFF as comparison method, minimum value gives the best match.

If input image is of size (WxH) and template image is of size (wxh), output image will have a size of (W-w+1, H-h+1).

Template Matching in OpenCV

Here, as an example, we will search for Messi’s face in his photo. So I created a template as below:

We will try all the comparison methods so that we can see how their results look like:

import cv2
import numpy as np
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

img = cv2.imread('messi5.jpg',0)
img2 = img.copy()
template = cv2.imread('template.jpg',0)
w, h = template.shape[::-1]

# All the 6 methods for comparison in a list
methods = ['cv2.TM_CCOEFF', 'cv2.TM_CCOEFF_NORMED', 'cv2.TM_CCORR',
            'cv2.TM_CCORR_NORMED', 'cv2.TM_SQDIFF', 'cv2.TM_SQDIFF_NORMED']

for meth in methods:
    img = img2.copy()
    method = eval(meth)

    # Apply template Matching
    res = cv2.matchTemplate(img,template,method)
    min_val, max_val, min_loc, max_loc = cv2.minMaxLoc(res)

    # If the method is TM_SQDIFF or TM_SQDIFF_NORMED, take minimum
    if method in [cv2.TM_SQDIFF, cv2.TM_SQDIFF_NORMED]:
        top_left = min_loc
    else:
        top_left = max_loc
    bottom_right = (top_left[0] + w, top_left[1] + h)

    cv2.rectangle(img,top_left, bottom_right, 255, 2)

    plt.subplot(121),plt.imshow(res,cmap = 'gray')
    plt.title('Matching Result'), plt.xticks([]), plt.yticks([])
    plt.subplot(122),plt.imshow(img,cmap = 'gray')
    plt.title('Detected Point'), plt.xticks([]), plt.yticks([])
    plt.suptitle(meth)

    plt.show()

See the results below:

• cv2.TM_CCOEFF

• cv2.TM_CCOEFF_NORMED

• cv2.TM_CCORR

• cv2.TM_CCORR_NORMED

• cv2.TM_SQDIFF

• cv2.TM_SQDIFF_NORMED

Template Matching with Multiple Objects

In the previous section, we searched image for Messi’s face, which occurs only once in the image. Suppose you are searching for an object which has multiple occurances, cv2.minMaxLoc() won’t give you all the locations. In that case, we will use thresholding. So in this example, we will use a screenshot of the famous game Mario and we will find the coins in it.

import cv2
import numpy as np
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

img_rgb = cv2.imread('mario.png')
img_gray = cv2.cvtColor(img_rgb, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
template = cv2.imread('mario_coin.png',0)
w, h = template.shape[::-1]

res = cv2.matchTemplate(img_gray,template,cv2.TM_CCOEFF_NORMED)
threshold = 0.8
loc = np.where( res >= threshold)
for pt in zip(*loc[::-1]):
    cv2.rectangle(img_rgb, pt, (pt[0] + w, pt[1] + h), (0,0,255), 2)

cv2.imwrite('res.png',img_rgb)

Result:

Reference : http://opencv-python-tutroals.readthedocs.org/en/latest/py_tutorials/py_imgproc/py_template_matching/py_template_matching.html