There are more comments discussing the legitimacy of the question than those addressing the question itself. I'm not surprised. It's hard to ask a question on SO these days without getting hit with a request to close.
I'm not sure you couldn't solve this as an optical character recognition problem, with something like Isomap, which is invariant under orientation and scale changes. Break your image up into patches, reduce dimensionality on all of them, and find the location that way. I would predict that this is faster, at some cost in accuracy.
Yes it's a shame that just because of a few zealous high-voted people, all the interesting questions lose their legitimacy.