Improved quadratic time approximation of graph edit distance by combining Hausdorff matching and greedy assignment

•Review of recent quadratic-time approximations of graph edit distance.•Novel upper bound based on bipartite assignment in quadratic time (BP2).•Combines the principle of Hausdorff distance with bijective node substitutions.•Evaluated empirically on the IAM graph database repository.•Outperforms previous cubic-time approximation based on bipartite assignment (BP). Approximation of graph edit distance in polynomial time enables us to compare large, arbitrarily labeled graphs for structural pattern recognition. In a recent approximation framework, bipartite graph matching (BP) has been proposed to reduce the problem of edit distance to a cubic-time linear sum assignment problem (LSAP) between local substructures. Following the same line of research, first attempts towards quadratic-time approximation have been made recently, including a lower bound based on Hausdorff matching (Hausdorff Edit Distance) and an upper bound based on greedy assignment (Greedy Edit Distance). In this paper, we compare the two approaches and derive a novel upper bound (BP2) which combines advantages of both. In an experimental evaluation on the IAM graph database repository, we demonstrate that the proposed quadratic-time methods perform equally well or, quite surprisingly, in some cases even better than the cubic-time method.