Progressive graph matching: Making a move of graphs via probabilistic voting

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.