Matching non-aligned objects using a relational string-graph

Localising and aligning objects is a challenging task in computer vision that still remains largely unsolved. Utilising the syntactic power of graph representation, we define a relational string-graph matching algorithm that seeks to perform these tasks simultaneously. By matching the relations between vertices, where vertices represent high-level primitives, the relational string-graph is able to overcome the noisy and inconsistent nature of the vertices themselves. For each possible relation correspondence between two graphs, we calculate the rotation, translation, and scale parameters required to transform a relation into its counterpart. We plot these parameters in 4D space and use Gaussian mixture models and the expectation-maximisation algorithm to estimate the underlying parameters. Our method is tested on face alignment and recognition, but is equally (if not more) applicable for generic object alignment. © 2013 IEEE.