A diff procedure for music score files

Comparing music score files is an important task for many activities such as collaborative score editing, version control and evaluation of optical music recognition (OMR) or music transcription. Following the Unix diff model for text files, we propose an original procedure for computing the differences between two score files, typically in XML format. It performs a comparison of scores at the notation (graphical) level, based on a new intermediate tree representation of the music notation content of a score and a combination of sequence- and tree-edit distances. We also propose a tool to visualize the differences between two scores side-by-side, using the music notation engraving library Verovio, and we employ it to test the procedure on an OMR dataset.