Patent ID: 7295980

Claim:
A feature comparison apparatus comprising: a receiver operable to receive first and second sequences of features; an aligner operable to align features of the first sequence with features of the second sequence to form a number of aligned pairs of features; a comparator operable to compare the features of each aligned pair of features formed by said aligner to generate a comparison score representative of the similarity between the aligned pair of features; and a combiner operable to combine the comparison scores for all the aligned pairs of features to provide a measure of the similarity between the first and second sequences of features; wherein said comparator comprises: a first sub-comparator operable to compare, for each aligned pair, the first sequence feature in the aligned pair with each of a plurality of features taken from a set of predetermined features to provide a corresponding plurality of intermediate comparison scores representative of the similarity between said first sequence feature and the respective features from the set; a second sub-comparator operable to compare, for each aligned pair, the second sequence feature in the aligned pair with each of said plurality of features from the set to provide a further corresponding plurality of intermediate comparison scores representative of the similarity between said second sequence feature and the respective features from the set; and a calculator operable to calculate said comparison score for the aligned pair by combining said pluralities of intermediate comparison scores.