Perceptible Lightweight Zero-Mean Normalized Cross-Correlation for Infrared Template Matching

Infrared template matching is an essential technology that enables reliable and accurate object detection, recognition, and tracking in complex environments. Perceptible Lightweight Zero-mean normalized cross-correlation (ZNCC) Template Matching (PLZ-TM) has been proposed as a tool for matching infrared images obtained from cameras with different fields of view. Aligning such images is challenging because of the involved differences in thermal distributions, focus discrepancies, background elements, and distortions. The first stage of PLZ-TM involves extracting feature maps from the search and template images using a deep learning network. This deep learning network is designed with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture that omits pooling layers, thereby minimizing information loss during extraction. The subsequent stage involves matching the feature maps. The matching method utilizes a lightweight ZNCC (ZNCC) module that employs average pooling for training. The deep learning network is trained to optimize the distribution of the output heatmap and the probability at the correct location of the template image. PLZ-TM delivers excellent performance achieving a processing time of only 3.3 ms in matching a $640\times 480$ search image with a $192\times 144$ template image. Moreover, it attains a matching accuracy of 96% on a dataset obtained from infrared cameras with different fields of view.