Automatic learning of cost functions for graph edit distance

Graph matching and graph edit distance have become important tools in structural pattern recognition. The graph edit distance concept allows us to measure the structural similarity of attributed graphs in an error-tolerant way. The key idea is to model graph variations by structural distortion operations. As one of its main constraints, however, the edit distance requires the adequate definition of edit cost functions, which eventually determine which graphs are considered similar. In the past, these cost functions were usually defined in a manual fashion, which is highly prone to errors. The present paper proposes a method to automatically learn cost functions from a labeled sample set of graphs. To this end, we formulate the graph edit process in a stochastic context and perform a maximum likelihood parameter estimation of the distribution of edit operations. The underlying distortion model is learned using an Expectation Maximization algorithm. From this model we finally derive the desired cost functions. In a series of experiments we demonstrate the learning effect of the proposed method and provide a performance comparison to other models.     

Line segment Hausdorff distance on face matching

A novel concept of line segment Hausdorff distance is proposed in this paper. Researchers apply Hausdorff distance to measure the similarity of two point sets. It is extended here to match two sets of line segments. The new approach has the advantage to incorporate structural and spatial information to compute the similarity. The added information can conceptually provide more and better distinctive capability for recognition. This would strengthen and enhance the matching process of similar objects such as faces. The proposed technique has been applied online segments generated from the edge maps of faces with encouraging result that supports the concept experimentally. The results also implicate that line segments could provide sufficient information for face recognition. This might imply a new way for face coding and recognition.     

基于编辑距离的Web数据挖掘

Div+CSS流行于Web页面的布局,在这种布局下,网页中很多数据记录以重复结构的形式聚集在一个层级。为了更好地从网页中挖掘数据,提出了一种新的Web数据挖掘算法,把树编辑距离转化为字符串编辑距离的计算,改进字符串编辑距离算法,利用字符串编辑距离评价树的相似度,进而找到网页中的重复模式,提取数据。通过针对不同重复模式特征的网页的实验说明,基于编辑距离的Web数据挖掘算法不仅能提取具有根节点及上面几层相同的网页的数据,对具有底层节点相同的网页也是有效的。     

一种改进的Hausdorff距离地图匹配方法

目前的地图匹配算法分为在线和离线匹配两类。针对离线地图匹配中Marchal算法精度较低的问题,提出了一种改进的Housdorff距离匹配算法,利用航线方向角与Housdorff距离对Marchal匹配算法进行了改进。通过仿真试验的定性定量分析,新算法可以较好地纠正矢量数据不完整时产生的错误结果,很大程度上提高了匹配的准确性,可以为导航系统以及规划部门提供保障服务。     

基于改进Hausdorff距离的分层景象匹配算法

为克服传统的相似性度量容易受到噪声、遮挡和成像机理等因素影响的缺点,结合人的认知过程,提出了一种分层的模板匹配算法.首先利用了统计指标来对候选匹配区域进行预标记,其次通过对Hausdorff相似性度量的改进来提高其对遮挡、异源图像匹配的鲁棒性.实验结果证明了该方法能够有效地减少搜索区域大小,提高了遮挡情况下的匹配精度,验证了算法的有效性.     

Hybrid image matching combining Hausdorff distance with normalized gradient matching

Image matching has been a central problem in computer vision and image processing for decades. Most of the previous approaches to image matching can be categorized into the intensity-based and edge-based comparison. Hausdorff distance has been widely used for comparing point sets or edge maps since it does not require point correspondences. In this paper, we propose a new image similarity measure combining the Hausdorff distance with a normalized gradient consistency score for image matching. The normalized gradient consistency score is designed to compare the normalized image gradient fields between two images to alleviate the illumination variation problem in image matching. By combining the edge-based and intensity-based information for image matching, we are able to achieve robust image matching under different lighting conditions. We show the superior robustness property of the proposed image matching technique through experiments on face recognition under different lighting conditions.     

基于树编辑距离的工作流距离度量方法

在工作流的发现和聚类等应用中,需要对两个工作流模型的距离进行度量。因此,提出一种计算两个不同结构化工作流的距离定量度量方法。首先介绍了结构化工作流,并将每一个结构化工作流转换为流程结构树;然后基于两个结构树之间的树编辑距离来计算工作流之间的距离及相应相似度。该距离度量方法满足距离度量的3个属性,即同实体不可区分性、对称性和三角不等式性质。这些属性使得该距离度量方法可以在工作流模型管理活动中作为定量分析工具。实验结果表明,基于树编辑距离的工作流度量方法是可行的。同时,与基于邻接矩阵的距离度量方法相比,该方法考虑了不同结构之间的语义距离,有效验证了此方法的合理性。     

面向图相似性搜索的高效图编辑距离算法

在图相似性搜索问题中,图编辑距离是较为普遍的度量方法,其计算性能很大程度上决定了图相似性搜索算法的性能。针对传统图编辑距离算法中存在的因大量冗余映射和较大搜索空间导致的性能低下问题,提出了一种改进的图编辑距离算法。该算法首先对图中顶点进行等价划分,以此计算映射编码来判断等价映射;然后定义映射完整性更新等价映射优先级,选出主映射参与扩展;其次,设计高效的启发式函数,提出基于映射编码的下界计算方法,快速得到最优映射。最后,将改进的图编辑距离算法扩展应用于图相似性搜索。在不同数据集上的实验结果表明,该算法具有更好的搜索性能,在搜索空间上最大可降低49%,速度提升了约29%。     

Hausdorff距离和量子粒子群的二维图像匹配

提出了一种基于Hausdorff距离和量子粒子群算法的二维图像匹配算法。为了实现二维图像的搜索,首先利用Canny算子提取图像的边缘,再利用Hausdorff距离作为图像搜索的目标函数,然后引入了带量子行为的粒子群的优化算法来求解搜索所需的空间变化参数,实验结果表明,带量子行为的粒子群的优化算法（QPSO）能够迅速地在全局范围内找到最优解,因此应用于二维图像搜索是可行的。     

结合编辑距离和Google距离的语义标注方法*

提出了一种在领域本体指导下对网页进行语义标注的方法。该方法利用编辑距离和Google距离从词语的语法和语义两方面综合度量词汇与本体概念之间的语义相关度,从而在网页与本体之间建立映射关系。此外,对网页进行语义标注后,利用标注结果对本体进行有效扩充,使本体更趋于领域化。实验结果表明该方法是行之有效的。     

Tracking non-rigid objects using probabilistic Hausdorff distance matching

This paper proposes a new method of extracting and tracking a non-rigid object moving against a cluttered background while allowing camera movement. For object extraction we first detect an object using watershed segmentation technique and then extract its contour points by approximating the boundary using the idea of feature point weighting. For object tracking we take the contour to estimate its motion in the next frame by the maximum likelihood method. The position of the object is estimated using a probabilistic Hausdorff measurement while the shape variation is modelled using a modified active contour model. The proposed method is highly tolerant to occlusion. Unless an object is fully occluded during tracking, the result is stable and the method is robust enough for practical application.     

Robust Hausdorff distance measure for face recognition

Face is considered to be one of the biometrics in automatic person identification. The non-intrusive nature of face recognition makes it an attractive choice. For face recognition system to be practical, it should be robust to variations in illumination, pose and expression as humans recognize faces irrespective of all these variations. In this paper, an attempt to address these issues is made using a new Hausdorff distance-based measure. The proposed measure represent the gray values of pixels in face images as vectors giving the neighborhood intensity distribution of the pixels. The transformation is expected to be less sensitive to illumination variations besides preserving the appearance of face embedded in the original gray image. While the existing Hausdorff distance-based measures are defined between the binary edge images of faces which contains primarily structural information, the proposed measure gives the dissimilarity between the appearance of faces. An efficient method to compute the proposed measure is presented. The performance of the method on bench mark face databases shows that it is robust to considerable variations in pose, expression and illumination. Comparison with some of the existing Hausdorff distance-based methods shows that the proposed method performs better in many cases.     

Learning stochastic edit distance: Application in handwritten character recognition

Many pattern recognition algorithms are based on the nearest-neighbour search and use the well-known edit distance, for which the primitive edit costs are usually fixed in advance. In this article, we aim at learning an unbiased stochastic edit distance in the form of a finite-state transducer from a corpus of (input, output) pairs of strings. Contrary to the other standard methods, which generally use the Expectation Maximisation algorithm, our algorithm learns a transducer independently on the marginal probability distribution of the input strings. Such an unbiased way to proceed requires to optimise the parameters of a conditional transducer instead of a joint one. We apply our new model in the context of handwritten digit recognition. We show, carrying out a large series of experiments, that it always outperforms the standard edit distance.     

GPU-accelerated Hausdorff distance computation between dynamic deformable NURBS surfaces

We present a parallel GPU-accelerated algorithm for computing the directed Hausdorff distance from one NURBS surface to another, within a bound. We make use of axis-aligned bounding-box hierarchies that bound the NURBS surfaces to accelerate the computations. We dynamically construct as well as traverse the bounding-box hierarchies for the NURBS surfaces using operations that are optimized for the GPU. To compute the Hausdorff distance, we traverse this hierarchy after culling bounding-box pairs that do not contribute to the Hausdorff distance. Our contribution includes two-sided culling tests that can be performed in parallel using the GPU. The culling, based on the minimum and maximum distance ranges between the bounding boxes, eliminates bounding-box pairs from both surfaces that do not contribute to the Hausdorff distance simultaneously. We calculate accuracy bounds for our computed Hausdorff distance based on the curvature of the surfaces. Our algorithm runs in real-time with very small guaranteed error bounds for complex NURBS surfaces. Since we dynamically construct our bounding-box hierarchy, our algorithm can be used to interactively compute the Hausdorff distance for models made of dynamic deformable surfaces.     

Improved Approximation Bounds for Planar Point Pattern Matching

We analyze the performance of simple algorithms for matching two planar point sets under rigid transformations so as to minimize the directed Hausdorff distance between the sets. This is a well studied problem in computational geometry. Goodrich, Mitchell, and Orletsky presented a very simple approximation algorithm for this problem, which computes transformations based on aligning pairs of points. They showed that their algorithm achieves an approximation ratio of 4. We introduce a modification to their algorithm, which is based on aligning midpoints rather than endpoints. This modification has the same simplicity and running time as theirs, and we show that it achieves a better approximation ratio of roughly 3.14. We also analyze the approximation ratio in terms of a instance-specific parameter that is based on the ratio between diameter of the pattern set to the optimum Hausdorff distance. We show that as this ratio increases (as is common in practical applications) the approximation ratio approaches 3 in the limit. We also investigate the performance of the algorithm by Goodrich et al. as a function of this ratio, and present nearly matching lower bounds on the approximation ratios of both algorithms. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grants CCR-0098151 and CCF-0635099.     

一种基于Hausdorff距离的运动物体跟踪算法

针对视频处理中运动物体的检测和跟踪问题,提出了一种基于Hausdorff距离的目标跟踪算法。新算法提出首先采用多尺度分水岭变换获取运动物体模型,消除了传统基于分水岭变换算法存在的缺陷;然后使用部分Hausdorff距离实现后续帧中运动物体模型的匹配;最后再次使用多尺度分水岭算法完成运动物体模型的更新。实验表明,该算法可以有效地跟踪多个刚体或非刚体目标。     

基于树编辑距离的层次聚类算法

为了识别犯罪嫌疑人伪造和篡改的虚假身份,利用树编辑距离计算个体属性相似性,证明了树编辑距离的相关数学性质,对属性应用层次编码方法,提出了一种新的基于树编辑距离的层次聚类算法HCTED(Hi-erarchical Clustering Algorithm Based on Tree Edit Distance)。新算法通过树编辑操作使用最少的代价计算属性相似性,克服了传统聚类算法标称型计算的缺陷,提高了聚类精度,通过设定阈值对给定样本聚类。实验证明了新方法在身份识别上的准确性和有效性,讨论了不同参数对实验结果的影响,对比传统聚类算法,HCTED算法性能明显提高。新算法已经应用到警用流动人口分析中,取得了良好效果。     

一种基于鲁棒Hausdorff距离的目标匹配算法

在传统的基于边缘位置的Hausdorff距离匹配的基础上,将边缘的梯度信息引入到距离度量当中,构造了一种新的三维距离函数。在此基础上,提出了一种鲁棒的三维Hausdorff距离及其目标匹配算法,采用粗匹配与精匹配相结合的两步匹配策略有效解决了由距离度量维数增加所导致的算法复杂性增大的问题。实验表明,该算法相对于传统的基于边缘位置的Hausdorff距离目标匹配算法在鲁棒性上有很大的提高。