sum of absolute differences of two images - matlab

Question

I want to find how similar a picture is to some samples that I have (black and white).
I use the sum of absolute difference code, but because I'm new to MATLAB I didn't find out how to use it. How does this algorithm work? Does it give a measure of how similar the pics are?
I= imread('img1.jpg');
image2= imread('img2.jpg');
% J = uint8(filter2(fspecial('gaussian'), I));
K = imabsdiff(I,image2);
figure, imshow(K,[])

Answer 1

Well I think you pretty much answered your question yourself. It is the sum of the absolute difference. So let say you have img1 and img2 which are the same size and type.
To find the difference, do subtraction
img1-img2
To find the absolute difference, use the absolute value function abs
abs(img1-img2)
To find the sum, use the sum function. Note that you will need to do this for each "dimension" your image has. If you are not sure, type size(img1) and see if there are 2 or 3 numbers that show up, this corresponds to how many sum(...) you need to use.
For a color image (3 dimensions):
sum(sum(sum(abs(img1-img2))))
^^ Is the sum of the absolute differences. Whichever has the smallest sum can be considered the closest image.
If you have different sized images, you need to use the normxcorr2 function. This function will return a matrix of the same size with how well the template (small) image fits into the big image at each different point. Find the maximum value of that matrix and that is how well that image fits.
For instance:
correlation = normxcorr2(smallImg, bigImg);
compareMe = max(correlation(:))

Answer 2

It is best practice to use MATLAB's build-in function imabsdiff. In contrast to the other suggested answers, it takes care of the range boundaries if your image is formatted as uint8. Consider:
img1 = uint8(10);
img2 = uint8(20);
sum(abs(img1(:)-img2(:)))
gives you 0, whereas
imabsdiff(img1(:),img2(:))
correctly gives 10.

Answer 3

You should use the command im2col in MATLAB you will be able to do so in Vectorized manner.
Just arrange each neighborhood in columns (For each frame).
Put them in 3D Matrix and apply you operation on the 3rd dimension.
Code Snippet
I used Wikipedia's definition of "Sum of Absolute Differences".
The demo script:
```
% Sum of Absolute Differences Demo
numRows = 10;
numCols = 10;
refBlockRadius = 1;
refBlockLength = (2 * refBlockRadius) + 1;
mImgSrc = randi([0, 255], [numRows, numCols]);
mRefBlock = randi([0, 255], [refBlockLength, refBlockLength]);
mSumAbsDiff = SumAbsoluteDifferences(mImgSrc, mRefBlock);
```
The Function SumAbsoluteDifferences:
```
function [ mSumAbsDiff ] = SumAbsoluteDifferences( mInputImage, mRefBlock )
%UNTITLED2 Summary of this function goes here
% Detailed explanation goes here
numRows = size(mInputImage, 1);
numCols = size(mInputImage, 2);
blockLength = size(mRefBlock, 1);
blockRadius = (blockLength - 1) / 2;
mInputImagePadded = padarray(mInputImage, [blockRadius, blockRadius], 'replicate', 'both');
mBlockCol = im2col(mInputImagePadded, [blockLength, blockLength], 'sliding');
mSumAbsDiff = sum(abs(bsxfun(#minus, mBlockCol, mRefBlock(:))));
mSumAbsDiff = col2im(mSumAbsDiff, [blockLength, blockLength], [(numRows + blockLength - 1), (numCols + blockLength - 1)]);
end
```
Enjoy...