A Memetic Algorithm for Matching Spatial Configurations With the Histograms of Forces

In this paper, we present an approach for modeling and comparing small sets of 2-D objects based on their spatial relationships. This situation can arise in the conflation of a hand- or machine-drafted map to a satellite image, or in the correspondence problem of matching two images taken under different viewing conditions. We focus on the specific problem of matching a sketched map containing several 2-D objects to hand-segmented satellite imagery. We define a similarity measure between the spatial configurations of two object sets, which uses attributed relational graphs to represent scene information. Objects are represented as graph nodes and edges are defined by the histograms of forces between object pairs. We develop a memetic algorithm based on a (μ+λ) evolution strategy to solve this scene-matching problem with three domain-specific local search operators that are compared experimentally.