(IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 143

Vol. 2, No. 5, May 2010

Graph Matching Measure for Document Retrieval

Amina Ghardallou Lasmar1, Anis Kricha2 and Najoua Essoukri Ben Amara3
1
Higher Institute of Technological Studies of Sousse,
BP 135, Sousse Erriadh, 4023 Sousse Tunisia
Aminaghardallou@yahoo.fr
2
National Engineering School of Monastir
Avenue Ibn ElJazzar, 5019 Monastir, Tunisia
Anis.Kricha@topnet.tn
3
National Engineering School of Sousse
Avenue 18 janvier Babjdid Sousse 4000, Tunisia
Najoua.Benamara@eniso.rnu.tn

and pattern recognition [2], [6].

Abstract: In this paper, we propose an algorithm for graph
matching in a pattern recognition context. Graphs used for ARG has become commonly used as an adequate
mapping are formulated in terms of Attributed Relational Graph representation for documents owing to their representational
(ARG) to represent document structure. ARG nodes represent power. According to this representation, the nodes represent
regions composing the structure and edges define different entities to be matched and edges define relations operating
relations between them. A graph matching algorithm is between them. If the structural descriptions of document
presented to compare different document structure, based on
images are represented by graphs, different documents can
clique finding in an association graph. The originality of this
algorithm resides on the way of defining an association graph,
be matched by performing some kind of graph matching.
which allows us to define a similarity coefficient. The Graph matching is the process of finding a correspondence
coefficient measures the resemblance degree of two comparing between nodes and edges of two graphs that satisfies some
structures involving the best matching. constraints ensuring that similar substructures of one graph
Keywords: graph matching, structural representation, graph are mapped to substructures of the other. Two drawbacks
retrieval. can be stated for the use of graph matching in computer
vision. The first is its computational complexity which can
1. Introduction be solved by using approximate algorithms. The second
drawback is dealing with noise and distortion. Encoding
In document retrieval applications, it is essential to define
entity from a document by an ARG may not be perfect due
some description of the document based on a set of features.
to noise and errors introduced in low-level stages. In such
These descriptions are then used to search and determine
situations, graphs will be distorted by different attribute
which documents satisfy the query selection criteria. The
values, missing or added vertices or edges, etc. This fact
effectiveness of a document retrieval system ultimately
makes exact graph matching useless in many applications.
depends on the type of representation used to describe a
The matching must incorporate an error model able to
document. In pattern recognition, the document
identify the distortion results in distorted graphs. A
representation can be broadly divided into statistical and
matching between two graphs involving error models is
structural methods [6]. In the former, the document is
referred to as inexact graph matching. Several techniques
represented by a feature vector; and in the latter, a data
have been put forward to solve the graph matching problem.
structure (e.g. graphs or trees) is used to describe objects and
The main approaches are summarized in table 1 with the
their relationships in the document. In the last decades,
most representative references in the field of computer
many structural approaches have been developed which deal
vision.
especially with graph-based representations of graphic
document. These approaches have different purposes like
segmentation [5], [7], document retrieval by content [10]

Table 1: Comparison between classical graph matching

Exact matching Inexact Optimal Key references
matching
Backtrack tree search Yes No Yes [17], [1]
Decision tree Yes No Yes [11], [15]
Graph edition Yes Yes Yes [10], [3], [12], [14]
Association graph Yes No Yes [13]
144
In this paper, we address the problem of indexation of
historical Arabic document, which aims to represent the
structure of a document by a simple model and allows a
further process like document or object retrieval. Therefore,
we propose an ARG-based representation for the document
physical structure. A graph matching method is then
developed based on clique finding in an association graph to
compare document structures. Results are then ranked
according to coefficients which convey the degree of
similarity between a query document and database
documents.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: In the
next section, we propose the graph matching algorithm and
we also introduce a similarity coefficient between two
graphs. Experimentation is discussed in section 3. The final
part concerns the conclusion and future works.
2. Proposed approach
Even thought we are not interested in the segmentation step,
we should consider error introduced by this step knowing
that we operate with ancient documents, which includes
much degradation. Thus, we will adapt an exact graph
matching algorithm to our application to overcome
distortion and errors introduced in precedent stages. The
developed approach is based on a maximal clique finding in
a modified association graph. First, we define a graph-based
structure representation; the document structure is organized
in an ARG whose nodes represent the different regions
composing the document and the graph edges defining the
spatial relations between these regions. The second step
consists of constructing the association graph which is
modified compared to the proposed definition in literature
[8], [15] and adapted to our application. Finally, we define
a similarity coefficient by examining the characteristics of
the maximal clique in the AG.
2.1 Definition of the ARG
ARG is a powerful means of giving structural
descriptions of visual patterns. Within an ARG, we can
distinguish a syntactic part, made of the layout of unlabeled
nodes and edges respectively identifying the structural
primitive components of the pattern and their relations, and
a semantic part consisting of the attributes associated to
nodes and edges.
Formally an ARG graph is defined as a
quadruple G = (V , E , LV , LE ) , where V is the set of vertices,
E ⊆ V × V is the set of edges, and LV and LE are two labeling
functions associating attributes to vertices and edges
respectively.
A document and its corresponding ARG structure are
illustrated in Figure 1. In this figure, we denote the node
labels (text or graphics), and near the connecting lines we
denote edge labels (Upper; on the Right; Included; and
Upper Right). We have excluded other spatial relations to
avoid redundancy since the existence of a relation in a
direction implies that it is complementary in the other one.
(IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security,
Vol. 2, No. 5, May 2010
I1 (type: graphic)
R:in the right
R
I:included
I2 I3 R
I2
I1 (type: graphic)
I
I3 (type:text)
Figure 1. A document image and the corresponding ARG
representation
2.2 A modified association graph for structure
retrieval of the ARG
The proposed algorithm for graph matching is based on
clique finding in an association graph, which is one of the
most popular algorithms that can achieve an exact
matching.
For the two graphs G1 = (V1, E1, LV1 , LE1 )
and G 2 = (V 2, E 2, LV 2 , LE 2 ) , the association graph is a
vertex labeled, undirected graph which can be created by the
two step process [8], [15]:
1. For each correct vertex mapping from graph G1 to G2,
insert a vertex in the association graph. This vertex is
labeled with the vertex mapping between the vertices of G1
and G2.
2. For each pair of vertices va and wa in the association
graph, insert the edge (va ,wa) if the vertices mapped from
G1 have the same edge characteristics as the vertices
mapped from G2.
Our approach is based on the construction of an
association graph but with modification of the second step.
We will insert edges not only when we retrieve all
characteristics from vertices mapped from G1 and G2 but
also when some characteristics are existing. In this way, the
edges of the association graph will be level-headed with
weights.
We note (I1, I2) tow vertices from G1and (J1, J2) from
G2, where (I1, J1) and (I2, J2) present two correct mappings
from graph G1 to G2. These weights are affected to AG
edges as follows:
(va , wa ) = ((I1 , J1 ),(I 2 , J 2 ))
0 if (I1 = I 2 ) or (J1 = J 2 )

1 if LE1 (I1, I2 ) = LE2 (J 1, J 2 ) (1)

= 0.2 if LE1 (I1, I2 ) ≠ LE2 (J1 , J 2 )
2
3 if (LE1(I1 , I 2 ) ⊂ {U, R} and LE2 (J1 , J 2 ) = {UR})

 or inversly
In Figure 2, we illustrate an example of the way that we
create an association graph from two graphs G1 (figure 2.a)
and G2 (figure 2.b), candidates for comparison. Vertices of
the AG are created from tow correspondent vertices from G1
and G2 (tow vertices are correspondent when they have
similar attributes). Then AG edges are introduced between
tow vertices with different weights (figure 2.c).
Let us remember that a clique is a complete sub-graph so
that every pair of vertices is joined by an edge. Each clique
within the association graph represents a set of vertices
which have the same mutual relationships in G1 and G2;
i.e., the cliques represent sub-graphs common to G1 and G2.
In order to determine the number of possible common sub-
graphs between two graphs, it is sufficient to examine the
 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 145
Vol. 2, No. 5, May 2010

characteristics of cliques in an unlabeled, undirected graph Figure 2.d illustrates the maximal clique to a given
of the appropriate size. In literature, we find several association graph. If AG contains more than one clique, the
algorithms for clique finding like Messmer method [11] and maximal one is the one having maximal weights.
Belaid algorithm [4]. We have implemented for this goal an
optimal algorithm based on Messmer method.
I1 J1 (I 2 ,J 1 )
Gr Gr ( I1 , J 1 ) ( I 2 ,J 1 )
R I2

Gr
R I
0 .2 1 1
I

T xt T xt
J2
(I 3 ,J 2 )
I3 ( I3 ,J 2 )
(a ) G ra p h G 1 (b ) G rap h G 2 ( c ) A s s o c ia tio n G r a p h (d ) M a x im a l C li q u e

Figure 2. Illustration of the graph matching: (a) Graph G1, (b) Graph G2, (c) Association Graph, (d) Maximal clique

structures. Then, we experiment the proposed algorithm on

2.3 Similarity coefficient
It is intuitive to denote that the criteria that can
characterize the degree of resemblance of tow objects is
calculated, generally from the worth of common features in
ratio of all characteristics of two objects [9], [16]. For this
fact, we propose a measure similarity based on the clique
weight and the characteristic of the two candidates G1 and
G2.
We define description of a graph as the number of
vertices and edges like the number of regions and relations
involved in the structure of a document. This definition is
the same for a clique with a substitution number for the
weight of edges.
descr (C max ) − splits
sim(G1, G 2) =
descr (G1) + descr (G 2) − descr (G1 ∩ G 2)
where splits represent the penalty for the over matching of
vertices belonging to the maximal clique. In our case, splits
represent the sum of weights of all relations between
vertices of the clique and the remainder ones of the
association graph.
3. Results and experiments
To evaluate our approach, we have used a synthetic data
base that we generate from 100 different document
a set of 100 ancient documents. We have supposed that
these pages are pre-segmented and we have generated
corresponding graphs to be introduced as candidates for
matching process. We have illustrated bellow (table 2)
results of the application of our approach to queries
documents from synthetic database (query 1) and from
ancient document database (query 2). We conclude that the
similarity score illustrate well the efficiency of our approach
mainly with synthetic query.
4. Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented a new approach to indexing
and retrieval ancient document structure. Indexing process
(2) is performed by an ARG structure. Thus, document search
process is achieved by a graph matching algorithm based on
clique finding in an association graph. Our contribution is
involved in the creation of the AG which is level-headed
with weights, determined by analyzing relations in graphs
candidates for matching. Finally, the degree of similarity is
determined according to the characteristics of maximal
clique toward those of graphs candidates. We can conclude
that this approach offers good results and a nice challenge
for further improvements mainly by introducing other
content features for characterizing the structure.

Table 2: A tabulation of the top four documents matches for query document

I2 I3
I2 I2 I1
I3 I3 I2 I3
I2 I3 I1
I1
I1

Query 1 Sim=1 Sim=0.9136 Sim=0.8965 Sim=0.8586

Query 2 Sim=1 Sim= 0.7097 Sim=0.7097 Sim=0.5818

146 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security,
Vol. 2, No. 5, May 2010

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