Finding a subimage inside a Numpy image

Question

I have two Numpy arrays (3-dimensional uint8) converted from PIL images.

I want to find if the first image contains the second image, and if so, find out the coordin

Answer 1

You can actually reduce this problem to a simple string search using a regex like the following implementation - accepts two PIL.Image objects and finds coordinates of the needle within the haystack. This is about 127x faster than using a pixel-by-pixel search.

def subimg_location(haystack, needle):
    haystack = haystack.convert('RGB')
    needle   = needle.convert('RGB')

    haystack_str = haystack.tostring()
    needle_str   = needle.tostring()

    gap_size = (haystack.size[0] - needle.size[0]) * 3
    gap_regex = '.{' + str(gap_size) + '}'

    # Split b into needle.size[0] chunks
    chunk_size = needle.size[0] * 3
    split = [needle_str[i:i+chunk_size] for i in range(0, len(needle_str), chunk_size)]

    # Build regex
    regex = re.escape(split[0])
    for i in xrange(1, len(split)):
        regex += gap_regex + re.escape(split[i])

    p = re.compile(regex)
    m = p.search(haystack_str)

    if not m:
        return None

    x, _ = m.span()

    left = x % (haystack.size[0] * 3) / 3
    top  = x / haystack.size[0] / 3

    return (left, top)