Clustering-aware multiple graph matching via decayed pairwise matching composition

Abstract

Jointly matching of multiple graphs is challenging and recently has been an active topic in machine learning and computer vision. State-of-the-art methods have been devised, however, to our best knowledge there is no effective mechanism that can explicitly deal with the matching of a mixture of graphs belonging to multiple clusters, e.g., a collection of bikes and bottles. Seeing its practical importance, we propose a novel approach for multiple graph matching and clustering. Firstly, for the traditional multi-graph matching setting, we devise a composition scheme based on a tree structure, which can be seen as in the between of two strong multigraph matching solvers, i.e., MatchOpt (Yan et al. 2015a) and CAO (Yan et al. 2016a). In particular, it can be more robust than MatchOpt against a set of diverse graphs and more efficient than CAO. Then we further extend the algorithm to the multiple graph matching and clustering setting, by adopting a decaying technique along the composition path, to discount the meaningless matching between graphs in different clusters. Experimental results show the proposed methods achieve excellent trade-off on the traditional multi-graph matching case, and outperform in both matching and clustering accuracy, as well as time efficiency.