Robust Template Matching via Hierarchical Convolutional Features from a Shape Biased CNN

Finding a template in a search image is an important task underlying many computer vision applications. Recent approaches perform template matching in a deep feature space, produced by a convolutional neural network (CNN), which is found to provide more tolerance to changes in appearance. In this article we investigate if enhancing the CNN's encoding of shape information can produce more distinguishable features that improve the performance of template matching. This investigation results in a new template matching method that produces state-of-the-art results on a standard benchmark. To confirm these results we also create a new benchmark and show that the proposed method also outperforms existing techniques on this new dataset. We further applied the proposed method to tracking and achieved more robust results.