Dynamic time warping of cyclic strings for shape matching

Cyclic strings are strings with no starting or ending point, such as those describing a closed contour. We present a new algorithm to compute a similarity measure between two cyclic sequences based on Dynamic Time Warping. The algorithm computes the optimal alignment between both sequences and is based on the cyclic edit distance algorithm proposed by Maes. The algorithm runs in O(mn lg m) time, where m and n are the lengths of the compared strings. Experiments on a shape classification and shape retrieval with a public database are presented.