Recent advances in graph matching

A powerful and universal data structure with applications in various subfields of science and engineering is graphs. In computer vision and image analysis, graphs are often used for the representation of structured objects. For example, if the problem is to recognize instances of known objects in an image, then often models, or prototypes, of the known objects are represented by means of graphs and stored in a database. The unknown objects in the input image are extracted by means of suitable preprocessing and segmentation algorithms, and represented by graphs that are analogous to the model graphs. Thus, the problem of object recognition is transformed into a graph matching problem. In this paper, it is assumed that there is an input graph that is given on-line, and a number of model, or prototype, graphs that are known a priori. We present a new approach to subgraph isomorphism detection which is based on a compact representation of the model graphs that is computed off-line. Subgraphs that appear multiple times within the same or within different model graphs are represented only once, thus reducing the computational effort to detect them in an input graph. In the extreme case where all model graphs are highly similar, the run time of the new algorithm becomes independent of the number of model graphs. We also describe an extension of this method to error-correcting graph matching. Furthermore, an approach to subgraph isomorphism detection based on decision trees is proposed. A decision tree is generated from the models in an off-line phase. This decision tree can be used for subgraph isomorphism detection. The time needed for decision tree traversal is only polynomial in terms of the number of nodes of the input graph. Moreover, the time complexity of the decision tree traversal is completely independent on the number of model graphs, regardless of their similarity. However, the size of the decision tree is exponential in the number of nodes of the models. To cut down the space complexity of the decision tree, some pruning strategies are discussed.