A genetic algorithm and its parallelization for graph matching with similarity measures

Graph matching and similarity measures of graphs have many applications to pattern recognition, machine vision in robotics, and similarity-based approximate reasoning in artificial intelligence. This paper proposes a method of matching and a similarity measure between two directed labeled graphs. We define the degree of similarity, the similar correspondence, and the similarity map which denotes the matching between the graphs. As an approximate computing method, we apply genetic algorithms (GA) to find a similarity map and compute the degree of similarity between graphs. For speed, we make parallel implementations in almost all steps of the GA. We have implemented the sequential GA and the parallel GA in C programs, and made simulations for both GAs. The simulation results show that our method is efficient and useful. © 1998, ISAROB.