Structural descriptions and inexact matching

L G Shapiro; R M Haralick

doi:10.1109/tpami.1981.4767144

Structural descriptions and inexact matching

IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell. 1981 May;3(5):504-19. doi: 10.1109/tpami.1981.4767144.

Authors

L G Shapiro¹, R M Haralick

Affiliation

¹ SENIOR MEMBER, IEEE, Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061.

PMID: 21868971
DOI: 10.1109/tpami.1981.4767144

Abstract

In this paper we formally define the structural description of an object and the concepts of exact and inexact matching of two structural descriptions. We discuss the problems associated with a brute-force backtracking tree search for inexact matching and develop several different algorithms to make the tree search more efficient. We develop the formula for the expected number of nodes in the tree for backtracking alone and with a forward checking algorithm. Finally, we present experimental results showing that forward checking is the most efficient of the algorithms tested.