Single and Double Element Dynamic Programming Algorithm for Melody Matching

Ping-Hung Chen, Jian-Jiun Ding

Abstract: Dynamic programming (DP) is an effective algorithm to determine the similarity between two sequences. It plays an important role in text comparison, nucleotide sequence alignment, and melody matching. Conventional DP method performs element-to-element or element-to-space comparison and considers only the cases of replacement, deletion, and insertion. In this work, we improve the DP method by performing multiple element comparison. That is, in addition to perform element-wise comparison, we also compare the similarities of element-space to element and space-element to element. Moreover, the global similarity is also adopted to improve the accuracy of DP. Experiments show that, with the proposed algorithm, the accuracy of melody matching can be much improved. It is helpful for improving the performance of the query-by-humming system and applicable to other sequence comparison problems.