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Feature correspondence lays the foundation for many computer vision and image processing tasks, which can be well formulated and solved by graph matching. Because of the high complexity, approximate methods are necessary for graph matching, and the continuous relaxation provides an efficient approximate scheme. But there are still many problems to be settled, such as the highly nonconvex objective function, the ignorance of the combinatorial nature of graph matching in the optimization process, and few attention to the outlier problem. Focusing on these problems, this paper introduces a continuation method directly targeting at the combinatorial optimization problem associated with graph matching. Specifically, first a regularization function incorporating the original objective function and the discrete constraints is proposed. Then a continuation method based on Gaussian smoothing is applied to it, in which the closed forms of relevant functions with respect to the outlier distribution are deduced. Experiments on both synthetic data and real world images validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose the graduated nonconvexity and concavity procedure (GNCCP) as a general optimization framework to approximately solve the combinatorial optimization problems defined on the set of partial permutation matrices. GNCCP comprises two sub-procedures, graduated nonconvexity which realizes a convex relaxation and graduated concavity which realizes a concave relaxation. It is proved that GNCCP realizes exactly a type of convex-concave relaxation procedure (CCRP), but with a much simpler formulation without needing convex or concave relaxation in an explicit way. Actually, GNCCP involves only the gradient of the objective function and is therefore very easy to use in practical applications. Two typical related NP-hard problems, partial graph matching and quadratic assignment problem (QAP), are employed to demonstrate its simplicity and state-of-the-art performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The path following algorithm was proposed recently to approximately solve the matching problems on undirected graph models and exhibited a state-of-the-art performance on matching accuracy. In this paper, we extend the path following algorithm to the matching problems on directed graph models by proposing a concave relaxation for the problem. Based on the concave and convex relaxations, a series of objective functions are constructed, and the Frank-Wolfe algorithm is then utilized to minimize them. Several experiments on synthetic and real data witness the validity of the extended path following algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]