Structural Pattern Recognition (SPR) and Operations Research (OR)

SPR and OR combination is a recent research topic in the RFAI group. SPR is about developing techniques to recognize or classify objects based on structural representations such as graphs. It has many applications in different domains such as Computer Vision, Bio-informatics and Chem-informatics. OR is about dealing with hard combinatorial optimization problems by providing efficient modeling and solving techniques. It is a very active research field that touches many domains such as economics, transport and healthcare. Whereas SPR is a hot topic in RFAI group, OR is the same for the ROOT group of the LIFAT.

The idea of combining researches from both fields at LIFAT started few years ago with Zeina Abu-Aisheh’s PhD work and has been going on with Mostafa DARWICHE’s PhD.

Numerous difficult and combinatorial problems appear in SPR, especially the ones belonging the Graph Matching (GM) family of problems where the goal is to find a relation between the vertices of the two graphs. Graphs are rotation invariant and may contain outliers. Such problems are known to be hard to solve in a convenient amount of time. The research are, then, focused on designing and developing solving techniques adopted from OR to tackle GM problems.

For recent results on this topic, please see Mostafa DARWICHE page and publications on HAL-Archives.

Romain Raveaux works on graph matching are here with significant result in https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003132031730300X

Other people involved in the group: Donatello Conte and Jean-Yves Ramel