A global method for music symbol recognition in typeset music sheets

Abstract

This paper presents an optical music recognition (OMR) system that can automatically recognize the main musical symbols of a scanned paper-based music score. Two major stages are distinguished: the first one, using low-level pre-processing, detects the isolated objects and outputs some hypotheses about them; the second one has to take the final correct decision, through high-level processing including contextual information and music writing rules. This article exposes both stages of the method: after explaining in detail the first one, the symbol analysis process, it shows through first experiments that its outputs can efficiently be used as inputs for a high-level decision process.