Development of a written music-recognition system using Java and open source technologies

Gernot Loibner; Andreas Schwarzl; Matthias Kovač; Dietmar Paulus; Wolfgang Pölzleitner

doi:10.1117/12.632079

24 October 2005 Development of a written music-recognition system using Java and open source technologies

Gernot Loibner, Andreas Schwarzl, Matthias Kovač, Dietmar Paulus, Wolfgang Pölzleitner

Proceedings Volume 6006, Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision XXIII: Algorithms, Techniques, and Active Vision; 60060W (2005) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.632079
Event: Optics East 2005, 2005, Boston, MA, United States

Abstract

We report on the development of a software system to recognize and interpret printed music. The overall goal is to scan printed music sheets, analyze and recognize the notes, timing, and written text, and derive the all necessary information to use the computers MIDI sound system to play the music. This function is primarily useful for musicians who want to digitize printed music for editing purposes. There exist a number of commercial systems that offer such a functionality. However, on testing these systems, we were astonished on how weak they behave in their pattern recognition parts. Although we submitted very clear and rather flawless scanning input, none of these systems was able to e.g. recognize all notes, staff lines, and systems. They all require a high degree of interaction, post-processing, and editing to get a decent digital version of the hard copy material. In this paper we focus on the pattern recognition area. In a first approach we tested more or less standard methods of adaptive thresholding, blob detection, line detection, and corner detection to find the notes, staff lines, and candidate objects subject to OCR. Many of the objects on this type of material can be learned in a training phase. None of the commercial systems we saw offers the option to train special characters or unusual signatures. A second goal in this project is to use a modern software engineering platform. We were interested in how well Java and open source technologies are suitable for pattern recognition and machine vision. The scanning of music served as a case-study.

Citation Download Citation

Gernot Loibner, Andreas Schwarzl, Matthias Kovač, Dietmar Paulus, and Wolfgang Pölzleitner "Development of a written music-recognition system using Java and open source technologies", Proc. SPIE 6006, Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision XXIII: Algorithms, Techniques, and Active Vision, 60060W (24 October 2005); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.632079

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