Optical Music Recognition with Wavelets

Abstract

The aim of optical music recognition (OMR) is to “recognise” images of music notation and capture the “meaning” of the music. When OMR is successful it will be able to automatically extract a logical representation of printed or handwritten music captured in an image. There are a variety of reasons why OMR is required. Chiefly, it is convenient for swift input of music notation and might be subsequently edited, performed, used as a search or other. There are many stages before that final high-level interpretation can be made and recognition of the primitive symbols contained in the notation is primary. One of the biggest challenges in OMR is the super-imposition of music notation symbols – notes and other – upon stave lines in the music image. This article examines a general-purpose knowledge-free method in the wavelet transform, to deal with super-imposition in images of typeset music.