Matching Free Trees, Maximal Cliques, and Monotone Game Dynamics

—Motivated by our recent work on rooted tree matching, in this paper we provide a solution to the problem of matching two free (i.e., unrooted) trees by constructing an association graph whose maximal cliques are in one-to-one correspondence with maximal common subtrees. We then solve the problem using simple payoff-monotonic dynamics from evolutionary game theory. We illustrate the power of the approach by matching articulated and deformed shapes described by shape-axis trees. Experiments on hundreds of larger, uniformly random trees are also presented. The results are impressive: despite the inherent inability of these simple dynamics to escape from local optima, they always returned a globally optimal solution.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: EMMCVPR
• Authors: Marcello Pelillo
• Keywords: Computer Vision, EMMCVPR 2001, Maximal Common Subtrees, Simple Payoff-monotonic Dynamics, Uniformly Random Trees