In this study, we formulate the concept of "mining maximal-size frequent subgraphs" in the challenging domain of visual data (images and videos). In general, visual knowledge can usually be modeled as attributed relational graphs (ARGs) with local attributes representing local parts and pairwise attributes describing the spatial relationship between parts. Thus, from a practical perspective, such mining of maximal-size subgraphs can be regarded as a general platform for discovering and modeling the common objects within cluttered and unlabeled visual data. Then, from a theoretical perspective, visual graph mining should encode and overcome the great fuzziness of messy data collected from complex real-world situations, which conflicts with the conventional theoretical basis of graph mining designed for tabular data. Common subgraphs hidden in these ARGs usually have soft attributes, with considerable inter-graph variation. More importantly, we should also discover the latent pattern space, including similarity metrics for the pattern and hidden node relations, during the mining process. In this study, we redefine the visual subgraph pattern that encodes all of these challenges in a general way, and propose an approximate but efficient solution to graph mining. We conduct five experiments to evaluate our method with different kinds of visual data, including videos and RGB RGB-D images. These experiments demonstrate the generality of the proposed method.
@cite_33: As a fundamental problem in pattern recognition, graph matching has applications in a variety of fields, from computer vision to computational biology. In graph matching, patterns are modeled as graphs and pattern recognition amounts to finding a correspondence between the nodes of different graphs. Many formulations of this problem can be cast in general as a quadratic assignment problem, where a linear term in the objective function encodes node compatibility and a quadratic term encodes edge compatibility. The main research focus in this theme is about designing efficient algorithms for approximately solving the quadratic assignment problem, since it is NP-hard. In this paper we turn our attention to a different question: how to estimate compatibility functions such that the solution of the resulting graph matching problem best matches the expected solution that a human would manually provide. We present a method for learning graph matching: the training examples are pairs of graphs and the labels' are matches between them. Our experimental results reveal that learning can substantially improve the performance of standard graph matching algorithms. In particular, we find that simple linear assignment with such a learning scheme outperforms Graduated Assignment with bistochastic normalisation, a state-of-the-art quadratic assignment relaxation algorithm.
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@cite_3: In this paper we present a new approach for establishing correspondences between sparse image features related by an unknown non-rigid mapping and corrupted by clutter and occlusion, such as points extracted from a pair of images containing a human figure in distinct poses. We formulate this matching task as an energy minimization problem by defining a complex objective function of the appearance and the spatial arrangement of the features. Optimization of this energy is an instance of graph matching, which is in general a NP-hard problem. We describe a novel graph matching optimization technique, which we refer to as dual decomposition (DD), and demonstrate on a variety of examples that this method outperforms existing graph matching algorithms. In the majority of our examples DD is able to find the global minimum within a minute. The ability to globally optimize the objective allows us to accurately learn the parameters of our matching model from training examples. We show on several matching tasks that our learned model yields results superior to those of state-of-the-art methods.
@cite_0: Graph matching is an essential problem in computer vision that has been successfully applied to 2D and 3D feature matching and object recognition. Despite its importance, little has been published on learning the parameters that control graph matching, even though learning has been shown to be vital for improving the matching rate. In this paper we show how to perform parameter learning in an unsupervised fashion, that is when no correct correspondences between graphs are given during training. Our experiments reveal that unsupervised learning compares favorably to the supervised case, both in terms of efficiency and quality, while avoiding the tedious manual labeling of ground truth correspondences. We verify experimentally that our learning method can improve the performance of several state-of-the art graph matching algorithms. We also show that a similar method can be successfully applied to parameter learning for graphical models and demonstrate its effectiveness empirically.
@cite_43: Many tasks in computer vision are formulated as graph matching problems. Despite the NP-hard nature of the problem, fast and accurate approximations have led to significant progress in a wide range of applications. Learning graph models from observed data, however, still remains a challenging issue. This paper presents an effective scheme to parameterize a graph model, and learn its structural attributes for visual object matching. For this, we propose a graph representation with histogram-based attributes, and optimize them to increase the matching accuracy. Experimental evaluations on synthetic and real image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, and show significant improvement in matching accuracy over graphs with pre-defined structures.
@cite_25: Graph matching is widely used in a variety of scientific fields, including computer vision, due to its powerful performance, robustness, and generality. Its computational complexity, however, limits the permissible size of input graphs in practice. Therefore, in real-world applications, the initial construction of graphs to match becomes a critical factor for the matching performance, and often leads to unsatisfactory results. In this paper, to resolve the issue, we propose a novel progressive framework which combines probabilistic progression of graphs with matching of graphs. The algorithm efficiently re-estimates in a Bayesian manner the most plausible target graphs based on the current matching result, and guarantees to boost the matching objective at the subsequent graph matching. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that our approach effectively handles the limits of conventional graph matching and achieves significant improvement in challenging image matching problems.
Given a graph template and a number of ARGs, methods for learning graph matching have been proposed to train parameters or refine the graph template for better matching performance. Most techniques @cite_43 @cite_33 @cite_0 @cite_3 @cite_9 take a supervised approach, they require the manual labeling of node correspondences between different ARGs. Leordeanu @cite_0 proposed the first unsupervised method of learning graph matching, and Zhang @cite_22 further refined the template structure in an unsupervised fashion. Cho @cite_25 proposed a similar idea that matched two ARGs and simultaneously extracted the most reliable edges between the two matched subgraphs. Essentially, these methods are not comparable with graph mining. They mainly train parameters or delete bad'' nodes from the graph template, rather than discovering new pattern nodes and recovering the prototype graphical patterns.