Reactive tabu search for measuring graph similarity

International audienceGraph matching is often used for image recognition. Different kinds of graph matchings have been proposed such as (sub)graph isomorphism or error-tolerant graph matching, giving rise to different graph similarity measures. A first goal of this paper is to show that these different measures can be viewed as special cases of a generic similarity measure introduced in [Champin & Solnon 03]. This generic similarity measure is based on a non-bijective graph matching (like [Boeres & al. 04] and [Ambauen & al. 03]) so that it is well suited to image recognition. In particular, over/under-segmentation problems can be handled by linking one vertex to a set of vertices. In a second part, we address the problem of computing this measure and we describe two algorithms: a greedy algorithm, that quickly computes sub-optimal solutions, and a reactive Tabu search algorithm, that may improve these solutions. Some experimental results are given