Patent ID: 7636478

Claim:
A method of operating a precision machine vision inspection system to search for matches for multiple templates in an image, the method comprising: setting up a plurality of templates to be used for searching the image; and searching the image using multiple templates, wherein searching the image using multiple templates comprises: determining at least one early elimination condition, the at least one early elimination condition comprising an inter-template early elimination condition, wherein the inter-template early elimination condition is based at least partially on an inter-template early elimination value that characterizes the degree of matching between one of the plurality of templates and the image, at a location in the image; determining a first inter-template early elimination value for at least a first location in the image, the first inter-template early elimination value characterizing the degree of matching between a first template of the plurality of templates and the image at the first location; and rejecting at least a second template of the plurality of templates as a potential match at the first location based on comparing the first inter-template early elimination value to a second value characterizing the degree of matching between the second template of the plurality of templates and the image at the first location; wherein the first inter-template early elimination value is determined according to a first set of operations, and the second value is determined according to a second set of operations that is different than the first set of operations, and wherein the first inter-template early elimination value consists of a correlation function value determined based on a complete set of correlation function value determining operations comprising pixel-by-pixel comparison operations between the first template and the image, at a first level of resolution; and the second value consists of an incomplete correlation function value determined based on an incomplete set of correlation function value determining operations comprising pixel-by-pixel comparison operations between the second template and the image at the first level of resolution.