
Abstract
Graphs are a ubiquitous mathematical abstraction employed in numerous problems in science and engineering. Of particular importance is the need to find best structure-preserving matching of graphs. Sincegraph matching is a computationally intractable problem, numerous heuristics exist to approximate its solution. An important class of graph matching heuristics is relaxation techniques based on replacing the original problem by a continuous convex program. Conditions for applicability or inapplicability of such convex relaxations are poorly understood. In this talk, I will show easy to check spectral properties characterizing a wide family of graphs for which equivalence of convex relaxation to the exact graph matching is guaranteed to hold.