Graph-Context Attention Networks for Size-Varied Deep Graph Matching

Zheheng Jiang, Hossein Rahmani, Plamen Angelov, Sue Black, Bryan M. Williams; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 2343-2352

Deep learning for graph matching has received growing interest and developed rapidly in the past decade. Although recent deep graph matching methods have shown excellent performance on matching between graphs of equal size in the computer vision area, the size-varied graph matching problem, where the number of keypoints in the images of the same category may vary due to occlusion, is still an open and challenging problem. To tackle this, we firstly propose to formulate the combinatorial problem of graph matching as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem, which is more flexible and efficient to facilitate comparing graphs of varied sizes. A novel Graph-context Attention Network (GCAN), which jointly capture intrinsic graph structure and cross-graph information for improving the discrimination of node features, is then proposed and trained to resolve this ILP problem with node correspondence supervision. We further show that the proposed GCAN model is efficient to resolve the graph-level matching problem and is able to automatically learn node-to-node similarity via graph-level matching. The proposed approach is evaluated on three public keypoint-matching datasets and one graph-matching dataset for blood vessel patterns, with experimental results showing its superior performance over existing state-of-the-art algorithms on the keypoint and graph-level matching tasks.