Accurate Real-time Windowed Time Warping

Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is used to find alignments between two related streams of information and can be used to link data, recognise patterns or find similarities. Typically, DTW requires the complete series of both input streams in advance and has quadratic time and space requirements. As such DTW is unsuitable for real-time applications and is inefficient for aligning long sequences. We present Windowed Time Warping (WTW), a variation on DTW that, by dividing the path into a series of DTW windows and making use of path cost estimation, achieves alignments with an accuracy and efficiency superior to other leading modifications and with the capability of synchronising in real-time. We demonstrate this method in a score following application. Evaluation of the WTW score following system found 97.0% of audio note onsets were correctly aligned within 2000 ms of the known time. Results also show reductions in execution times over state-of-theart efficient DTW modifications.