Unsupervised learning for graph matching

Graph matching is an important problem in computer vision. It is used in 2D and 3D object matching and recognition. Despite its importance, there is little literature on learning the parameters that control the graph matching problem, even though learning is important for improving the matching rate, as shown by this and other work. In this paper we show for the first time how to perform parameter learning in an unsupervised fashion, that is when no correct correspondences between graphs are given during training. We show empirically that unsupervised learning is comparable in efficiency and quality with the supervised one, while avoiding the tedious manual labeling of ground truth correspondences. We also verify experimentally that this learning method can improve the performance of several state-of-the art graph matching algorithms.