Chapter 12: Applications of Graph Methods

The development of syntactic pattern recognition models based on graph grammars was to start nearly twenty years after the invention of the first string and tree methods. Graph-based methods are usually used if string and tree structural descriptions are simply too weak to represent patterns. In the subsequent sections we shall present the following application areas of graph methods: scene analysis, picture and diagram analysis, feature recognition for computer aided design and manufacturing, analysis of visual events and activities, structure analysis in chemistry, optical character recognition, structure analysis for process monitoring and control, and structure analysis in bioinformatics and medicine. The last section includes a summary of these applications in a tabular form.