Factorized Graph Matching

Graph matching (GM) is a fundamental problem in computer science, and it plays a central role to solve correspondence problems in computer vision. GM problems that incorporate pairwise constraints can be formulated as a quadratic assignment problem (QAP). Although widely used, solving the correspondence problem through GM has two main limitations: (1) the QAP is NP-hard and difficult to approximate; (2) GM algorithms do not incorporate geometric constraints between nodes that are natural in computer vision problems. To address aforementioned problems, this paper proposes factorized graph matching (FGM). FGM factorizes the large pairwise affinity matrix into smaller matrices that encode the local structure of each graph and the pairwise affinity between edges. Four are the benefits that follow from this factorization: (1) There is no need to compute the costly (in space and time) pairwise affinity matrix; (2) The factorization allows the use of a path-following optimization algorithm, that leads to improved optimization strategies and matching performance; (3) Given the factorization, it becomes straight-forward to incorporate geometric transformations (rigid and non-rigid) to the GM problem. (4) Using a matrix formulation for the GM problem and the factorization, it is easy to reveal commonalities and differences between different GM methods. The factorization also provides a clean connection with other matching algorithms such as iterative closest point; Experimental results on synthetic and real databases illustrate how FGM outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for GM. The code is available at http://humansensing.cs.cmu.edu/fgm.