Optical Music Analysis for Printed Music Score and Handwritten Music Manuscript

Abstract

This chapter describes an optical document imaging system to transform paper-based music scores and manuscripts into machine-readable format and a restoration system to touch-up small imperfections (for example broken stave lines and stems), to restore deteriorated master copy for reprinting. The chapter presents a brief background of this field, discusses the main obstacles, and presents the processes involved for printed music scores processing; using a divide-and-conquer approach to sub-segment compound musical symbols (e.g., chords) and inter-connected groups (e.g., beamed quavers) into lower-level graphical primitives (e.g., lines and ellipses) before recognition and reconstruction. This is followed by discussions on the developments of a handwritten manuscripts prototype with a segmentation approach to separate handwritten musical primitives. Issues and approaches for recognition, reconstruction and revalidation using basic music syntax and high-level domain knowledge, and data representation are also presented.