Branching Path Following for Graph Matching

Recently, graph matching algorithms utilizing the path following strategy have exhibited state-of-the-art performances. However, the paths computed in these algorithms often contain singular points, which usually hurt the matching performance. To deal with this issue, in this paper we propose a novel path following strategy, named branching path following (BPF), which consequently improves graph matching performance. In particular, we first propose a singular point detector by solving an KKT system, and then design a branch switching method to seek for better paths at singular points. Using BPF, a new graph matching algorithm named BPF-G is developed by applying BPF to a recently proposed path following algorithm named GNCCP (Liu &Qiao 2014). For evaluation, we compare BPF-G with several recently proposed graph matching algorithms on a synthetic dataset and four public bench-mark datasets. Experimental results show that our approach achieves remarkable improvement in matching accuracy and outperforms other algorithms.