AUTOMATIC READING OF MUSIC NOTATION

The aim of Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is to convert optically scanned pages of music into a machine-readable format. In this tutorial level discussion of the topic, an historical background of work is presented, followed by a detailed explanation of the four key stages to an OMR system: stave line identification, musical object location, symbol identification, and musical understanding. The chapter also shows how recent work has addressed the issues of touching and fragmented objects—objectives that must be solved in a practical OMR system. The report concludes by discussing remaining problems, including measuring accuracy.