Editing Template matching (section)

== Implementation ==
In this simple implementation, it is assumed that the above described method is applied on grey images: This is why '''Grey''' is used as pixel intensity.  The final position in this implementation gives the top left location for where the template image best matches the search image.

<syntaxhighlight lang="c">
minSAD = VALUE_MAX;

// loop through the search image
for ( size_t x = 0; x <= S_cols - T_cols; x++ ) {
    for ( size_t y = 0; y <= S_rows - T_rows; y++ ) {
        SAD = 0.0;

        // loop through the template image
        for ( size_t j = 0; j < T_cols; j++ )
            for ( size_t i = 0; i < T_rows; i++ ) {

                pixel p_SearchIMG = S[y+i][x+j];
                pixel p_TemplateIMG = T[i][j];
		
                SAD += abs( p_SearchIMG.Grey - p_TemplateIMG.Grey );
            }

        // save the best found position 
        if ( minSAD > SAD ) { 
            minSAD = SAD;
            // give me min SAD
            position.bestRow = y;
            position.bestCol = x;
            position.bestSAD = SAD;
        }
    }
    
}</syntaxhighlight>

One way to perform template matching on color images is to decompose the [[pixel]]s into their color components and measure the quality of match between the color template and search image using the sum of the SAD computed for each color separately.