A Graph-based approach for Kite recognition

Kites are huge archaeological structures of stone visible from satellite images. Because of their important number and their wide geographical distribution, automatic recognition of these structures on images is an important step towards understanding these enigmatic remnants. This paper presents a complete identification tool relying on a graph representation of the Kites. As Kites are naturally represented by graphs, graph matching methods are thus the main building blocks in the Kite identification process. However, Kite graphs are disconnected geometric graphs for which traditional graph matching methods are useless. To address this issue, we propose a graph similarity measure adapted for Kite graphs. The proposed approach combines graph invariants with a geometric graph edit distance computation leading to an efficient Kite identification process. We analyze the time complexity of the proposed algorithms and conduct extensive experiments both on real and synthetic Kite graph data sets to attest the effectiveness of the approach. We also perform a set of experimentations on other data sets in order to show that the proposed approach is extensible and quite general. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.