Graph are widely used for representing the structure, topology and attributes of underlying information in various application domains of pattern recognition. Information retrieval based on the structural (and topological) similarity between query and retrieval candidates can be best modeled by an attributed graph retrieval problem, which thus is a very important research problem specially for the application domains of structural pattern recognition, computer vision, image analysis, data mining and machine learning. This research problem becomes more challenging if the graphs contain attributes on their nodes and arcs.
The research problem of searching a query graph in a database of graphs is termed as “subgraph spotting”. The proposed competition is focused on the research problem of subgraph spotting in a database of attributed graphs. The goal of the SSGCI competition is to spot a query attributed graph in a database of attributed graphs. This means that for a given query attributed graph the goal is to retrieve every graph in the database which contains this query graph and to provide node correspondences between the query and each of the result graphs.
This main challenge of the SSGCI competition represents an open research problem in graph-based structural pattern recognition. The problems of matching, indexing and retrieval of graph-based representations of underlying data are actively research into by various research teams around the globe. Our target audience are these researchers working on graph matching using exact as well as inexact approaches, who would like to participate in this competition to get their methods benchmarked with respect to the other state of the art methods.
Joint collaboration of IAPR TC10, TC11 and TC15
The SSGCI competition is a result of joint collaboration of various members (chair, executive, non-executive) of the following three technical committees of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR):
TC10 – IAPR Technical Committee on GRAPHICS RECOGNITION (www)
TC11 – IAPR Technical Committee on READING SYSTEMS (www)
TC15 – IAPR Technical Committee on GRAPH BASED REPRESENTATIONS (www)
SSGCI competition is an initiative endorsed by the above cited TCs of IAPR. Technical Committee TC15 of IAPR on “Graph Based Representation in Pattern Recognition maintains, since more than 10 years, a web page devoted to Benchmarking, with several graph databases (http://iapr-tc15.greyc.fr/links.html), and devotes a considerable attention to activities for the evaluation and experimental characterization of graph algorithms. It thus fully supports and promotes this initiative. The mailing lists of the above cited TCs (specially the TC15) will be used to invite participants. The new graph database developed for the proposed contest will be added to the TC15 website and a link to the article summing up the results of this contest will also be added to the TC15 website (within the limits permitted by copyright issues).