In order to enhance the real-time performance and stability of industrial-level machine vision systems

this paper proposes a fast template matching method with rotation invariance based on equal-area ring projection and Zernike moments.The method uses a coarse-to-fine matching strategy.The coarse matching stage uses the equal-area ring projection vector as the feature to obtain the candidates

and then use Zenrike moments to accurately match in candidates.The main contributions of this paper are proposing the equal-are ring projection vector feature with low complexity

noise insensitive and rotation invariance

and further reducing the computational cost of Zernike moments based on the octant circle method using circular symmetry.Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed method is faster than the state-of-the-art algorithm under high matching accuracy

and it is robust to Gaussian noise and linear brightness variations.