Abstract: Container recognition and location is one of the key technologies to realize port automation.
Template matching is one of the basic and frequently used image recognition methods. Traditional
template matching algorithm only based on gray information of pixels to compare and match objects.
When external environment changes slightly, the robustness of the algorithm is greatly reduced.
Moreover, there are some problems, such as low matching efficiency and adaptability, etc. So, an
algorithm was presented which combined with color template pre-position and image segmentation
based variable step size block matching. The feature vector with shape invariance was extracted,
which is an important basis of the container real-time recognition and location. The result shows that
this recognition method not only improved image segmentation efficiency, but has great adaptability
for target translation, rotation and scale change.

Key words: port automation, template matching, image recognition, block matching segmentation
algorithm, shape invariance