Symbol Recognition of Printed Piano Scores with Touching Symbols

Abstract

To build a music database efficiently, an automatic score recognition system is a critical component. Many previous methods are applicable only to some simple music scores. In case of complex music scores it becomes difficult to detect symbols correctly because of noise and connection between symbols included in the scores. In this paper, we propose a score recognition method which is applicable to the complex music scores. Symbol candidates are detected by template matching. From these candidates correct symbols are selected by considering their relative positions and mutual connections. Under the presence of noise and connected symbols, the proposed method outperformed "Score Maker" which is an optical music score recognition software