QATM: Quality-Aware Template Matching for Deep Learning

Finding a template in a search image is one of the core problems in many computer vision applications, such as template matching, image semantic alignment, image-to-GPS verification \etc. In this paper, we propose a novel quality-aware template matching method, which is not only used as a standalone template matching algorithm, but also a trainable layer that can be easily plugged in any deep neural network. Specifically, we assess the quality of a matching pair as its soft-ranking among all matching pairs, and thus different matching scenarios like 1-to-1, 1-to-many, and many-to-many will be all reflected to different values. Our extensive studies in the classic template matching problem and deep learning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of QATM: it not only outperforms SOTA template matching methods when used alone, but also largely improves existing DNN solutions when used in DNN.