Primitive segmentation in old handwritten music scores

Abstract

Optical Music Recognition consists in the identification of music information from images of scores. In this paper, we propose a method for the early stages of the recognition: segmentation of staff lines and graphical primitives in handwritten scores. After introducing our work with modern musical scores (where projections and Hough Transform are effectively used), an approach to deal with ancient handwritten scores is exposed. The recognition of such these old scores is more difficult due to paper degradation and the lack of a standard in musical notation. Our method has been tested with several scores of 19th century with high performance rates. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.