Object Detection using Template and HOG Feature Matching

In the present era, the applications of computer vision is increasing day by day. Computer vision is related to the automatic recognition, exploration and extraction of the necessary information from a particular image or a group of image sets. This paper addresses the method to detect the desired object from an image. Usually, a template of the desired object is used in detection through a matching technique named Template Matching. But it works well when the template image is cropped from the original one, which is not always invariant due to various transformations in the test images. To cope with this difficulty and to develop a generalized approach, we investigate in detail another technique which is known as HOG (Histogram of Oriented Gradient) approach. In HOG, the image is divided into overlapping blocks of template size and then compare each block’s normalized HOG with the normalized HOG of the template to find the best match of the object. We perform experiments with a large number of images and have found satisfactory performance.