Minimum cost subgraph matching using a binary linear program

•Minimum Cost Subgraph Matching (MCSM) is an adaptation of Graph Edit Distance.•The paper proposes a Binary Linear Program that solves the MCSM problem.•The proposed formulation is very general and can tackle a large range of graphs.•MCSM is more efficient and faster than a Substitution Only Tolerant Subgraph Matching (SOTSM).

This paper presents a binary linear program for the Minimum Cost Subgraph Matching (MCSM) problem. MCSM is an extension of the subgraph isomorphism problem where the matching tolerates substitutions of attributes and modifications of the graph structure. The objective function proposed in the formulation can take into account rich attributes (e.g. vectors mixing nominal and numerical values) on both vertices and edges. Some experimental results obtained on an application-dependent dataset concerning the spotting of symbols on technical drawings show that the approach obtains better performance than a previous approach which is only substitution-tolerant.