Optical Music Imaging: Music Document Digitisation, Recognition, Evaluation, and Restoration

Abstract

This paper presents the applications and practices in the domain of music imaging for musical scores (music sheets and music manuscripts), which include music sheet digitisation, optical music recognition (OMR) and optical music restoration. With a general background of Optical Music Recognition (OMR), the paper discusses typical obstacles in this domain and reports currently available commercial OMR software. It reports hardware and software related to music imaging, discussed the SharpEye optical music recognition system and provides an evaluation of a number of OMR systems. Besides the main focus on the transformation from images of music scores to symbolic format, this paper also discusses optical music image restoration and the application of music imaging techniques for graphical preservation and potential applications for cross-media integration.