This program is designed to match up items in two different lists, which may have two different systems of coordinates. The program allows the two sets of coordinates to be related by a linear, quadratic, or cubic transformation. It is an implementation of the algorithm described in Valdes et al., Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, vol 107, page 1119 (1995). You can find a brief description of my version in the Appendix of TASS Mark IV Photometric Survey of the Northern Sky.
The program was designed and written to work on lists of stars and other astronomical objects, but it might be applied to other types of data. In order to match two lists of N points, the main algorithm calls for O(N^6) operations (yes, that's N-to-the-sixth), so it's not the most efficient choice. I find myself becoming impatient for N >= 100, but your mileage may vary. On the other hand, it does allow for arbitrary translation, rotation, and scaling...
The source code is vanilla ANSI C, and links only against the standard math library. It works off the command line, with no user-friendly GUI. The self-test is written in Perl, but it's not necessary for the operation of the package.
The current version is match 0.10, last modified June 11, 2008.
Older versions:
Another approach to the pattern-matching problem is taken by Fionn Murtaugh, described in A New Approach to Point-Pattern Matching, PASP 104, 301 (1992). You can look at
Last modified June 11, 2008 by Michael Richmond