Python skimage.feature.match_template() RGB image

Question

So I'm doing template matching on a colored image and skimage.feature.match_template() seems to work just fine. But I'm not sure exactly how it is performing this because although the original images are size N x N x 3, the array output is one dimensional. I theorized that it was only performing the template match on the red layer perhaps, but this doesn't seem to be the case. Does it do some sort of averaging for RGB images? I want to understand where its getting its values from so I know that its interpreting the image correctly. Thanks!

Answer 1

From the match_template() documentation:

Returns
-------
output : array
         Response image with correlation coefficients.

So, the template matching uses either 2 or 3 dimensions depending on the input image and template. However, the output will always be a scalar score that tells you how well the template matched at a specific image position.