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A fast technique for comparing graph representations with applications to performance evaluation

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Abstract.

Finding efficient, effective ways to compare graphs arising from recognition processes with their corresponding ground-truth graphs is an important step toward more rigorous performance evaluation.

In this paper, we examine in detail the graph probing paradigm we first put forth in the context of our work on table understanding and later extended to HTML-coded Web pages. We present a formalism showing that graph probing provides a lower bound on the true edit distance between two graphs. From an empirical standpoint, the results of two simulation studies and an experiment using scanned pages show that graph probing correlates well with the latter measure. Moreover, our technique is very fast; graphs with tens or hundreds of thousands of vertices can be compared in mere seconds. Ease of implementation, scalability, and speed of execution make graph probing an attractive alternative for graph comparison.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Lehigh University, 19 Memorial Drive West, PA 18015, Bethlehem, USA

    D. Lopresti

  2. Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies Inc., 600 Mountain Avenue, NJ 07974, Murray Hill, USA

    G. Wilfong

Authors
  1. D. Lopresti
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  2. G. Wilfong
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to D. Lopresti.

Additional information

Received: 1 October 2002, Accepted: 15 January 2003, Published online: 6 February 2004

Correspondence to: D. Lopresti

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Lopresti, D., Wilfong, G. A fast technique for comparing graph representations with applications to performance evaluation. IJDAR 6, 219–229 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10032-003-0106-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10032-003-0106-z

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