Error-tolerant graph matching using node contraction

•Reducing the graph size by eliminating the nodes based on their degree measure.•Extension to graph edit distance based on node contraction.•Applied the proposed algorithm on letter and AIDS dataset.•Can act as a trade-off between time and accuracy considerations. Graph matching is the task of computing the similarity between two graphs. It is widely used in graph-based structural pattern recognition. Error-tolerant graph matching is a type of graph matching, in which a similarity between two graphs is computed based on some tolerance value whereas in exact graph matching a strict one-to-one correspondence is required between two graphs. In this paper, we present an approach to error-tolerant graph matching using node contraction where the given graph is transformed into another graph by contracting smaller degree nodes. We use this scheme to extend the notion of graph edit distance, which can be used as a trade-off between execution time and accuracy requirements of various graph matching applications.