Patent ID: 8625928

Claim:
An information processing apparatus, comprising: a generation means for generating a plurality of source image blocks obtained by dividing a connection area of a source image into a plurality of areas, and a plurality of template image blocks obtained by dividing a connection area of a template image into a plurality of areas, the connection area of the template image being superimposed on the connection area of the source image; a selection means for selecting a plurality of target image blocks as targets individually subjected to matching processing, based on luminance information of each of the template image blocks generated by the generation means; a matching processing means for calculating, by performing the matching processing on corresponding image blocks as images corresponding to the plurality of target image blocks selected by the selection means, in the plurality of source image blocks generated by the generation means, and the plurality of target image blocks, relative position information of the corresponding image blocks and the target image blocks; and a calculation means for calculating relative position shift information of the connection area of the source image and the connection area of the template image, based on the relative position information calculated by the matching processing means, wherein the generation means generates the plurality of template image blocks that correspond to the plurality of source image blocks and have a smaller size than that of the plurality of source image blocks, the matching processing means generates a correlation coefficient that is based on luminance information of each of the corresponding image blocks and luminance information of each of the target image blocks in accordance with a position of each of the target image blocks within each of the corresponding image blocks, to thereby perform the matching processing, and calculates the generated correlation coefficient as the relative position information, and the calculation means calculates the relative position shift information by cumulatively adding the correlation coefficients of the target image blocks, the correlation coefficients being calculated by the matching processing means.