Linear Reweighted Regularization Algorithms for Graph Matching Problem

Abstract: The graph matching problem is a significant special case of the Quadratic Assignment Problem, with extensive applications in pattern recognition, computer vision, protein alignments and related fields. As the problem is NP-hard, relaxation and regularization techniques are frequently employed to improve tractability. However, most existing regularization terms are nonconvex, posing optimization challenges. In this paper, we propose a linear reweighted regularizer framework for solving the relaxed graph matching problem, preserving the convexity of the formulation. By solving a sequence of relaxed problems with the linear reweighted regularization term, one can obtain a sparse solution that, under certain conditions, theoretically aligns with the original graph matching problem's solution. Furthermore, we present a practical version of the algorithm by incorporating the projected gradient method. The proposed framework is applied to synthetic instances, demonstrating promising numerical results.