A Covariance-matching-based Model for Musical Symbol Recognition

Abstract

A musical sheet is read by optical music recognition (OMR) systems that automatically recognize and reconstruct the read data to convert them into a machine-readable format such as XML so that the music can be played. This process, however, is very challenging due to the large variety of musical styles, symbol notation, and other distortions. In this paper, we present a model for the recognition of musical symbols through the use of a mobile application, whereby a camera is used to capture the input image; therefore, additional difficulties arise due to variations of the illumination and distortions. For our proposed model, we first generate a line adjacency graph (LAG) to remove the staff lines and to perform primitive detection. After symbol segmentation using the primitive information, we use a covariance-matching method to estimate the similarity between every symbol and pre-defined templates. This method generates the three hypotheses with the highest scores for likelihood measurement. We also add a global consistency (time measurements) to verify the three hypotheses in accordance with the structure of the musical sheets; one of the three hypotheses is chosen through a final decision. The results of the experiment show that our proposed method leads to promising results.