Abstract
An Optical Music Recognition (OMR) system especially adapted for handwritten musical scores of the XVII-th and the early XVIII-th centuries written in white mensural notation is presented. The system performs a complete sequence of analysis stages: the input is the RGB image of the score to be analyzed and, after a preprocessing that returns a black and white image with corrected rotation, the staves are processed to return a score without staff lines; then, a music symbol processing stage isolates the music symbols contained in the score and, finally, the classification process starts to obtain the transcription in a suitable electronic format so that it can be stored or played. This work will help to preserve our cultural heritage keeping the musical information of the scores in a digital format that also gives the possibility to perform and distribute the original music contained in those scores.
Highlights
Optical Music Recognition (OMR) aims to provide a computer with the necessary processing capabilities to convert a scanned score into an electronic format and even recognize and understand the contents of the score
OMR is related to Optical Character Recognition (OCR); it shows several differences based on the typology of the symbols to be recognized and the structure of the framework [1]
OMR has been an active research area since the 70s but it is in the early 90s when the first works for handwritten formats [2] and ancient music started to be developed [3, 4]
Summary
Optical Music Recognition (OMR) aims to provide a computer with the necessary processing capabilities to convert a scanned score into an electronic format and even recognize and understand the contents of the score. (a) Fragment of a score written in the style of Stephano di Britto (b) Fragment of a score written in the style of Francisco Sanz Figure 1: Fragments of scores in white mensural notation showing the two different notation styles analyzed in this work This topic will be considered in the paper together with all the stages required and the specific algorithms developed to get an electronic description of the music in the scores. Sanz (Figure 1(b)) shows a handwritten style close to the modern one, with rounded notes and vertical stems with varying thickness due to the use of a feather pen The scores of these two authors, and others of less importance in the ACM, are characterized by the presence of frontispieces, located at the beginning of the first page in Sanz style scores, and at the beginning of each voice (two voices per page) in Britto style scores.
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