Alfaro-Contreras, María, Valero-Mas, Jose J.
Exploiting the Two-Dimensional Nature of Agnostic Music Notation for Neural Optical Music Recognition
Alfaro-Contreras M, Valero-Mas JJ. Exploiting the Two-Dimensional Nature of Agnostic Music Notation for Neural Optical Music Recognition. Applied Sciences. 2021; 11(8):3621. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11083621
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10045/114284
DOI: 10.3390/app11083621
ISSN: 2076-3417
Abstract: 
State-of-the-art Optical Music Recognition (OMR) techniques follow an end-to-end or holistic approach, i.e., a sole stage for completely processing a single-staff section image and for retrieving the symbols that appear therein. Such recognition systems are characterized by not requiring an exact alignment between each staff and their corresponding labels, hence facilitating the creation and retrieval of labeled corpora. Most commonly, these approaches consider an agnostic music representation, which characterizes music symbols by their shape and height (vertical position in the staff). However, this double nature is ignored since, in the learning process, these two features are treated as a single symbol. This work aims to exploit this trademark that differentiates music notation from other similar domains, such as text, by introducing a novel end-to-end approach to solve the OMR task at a staff-line level. We consider two Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) schemes trained to simultaneously extract the shape and height information and to propose different policies for eventually merging them at the actual neural level. The results obtained for two corpora of monophonic early music manuscripts prove that our proposal significantly decreases the recognition error in figures ranging between 14.4% and 25.6% in the best-case scenarios when compared to the baseline considered.
Keywords:Optical music recognition, Deep learning, Connectionist temporal classification, Agnostic music notation, Sequence labeling
MDPI
info:eu-repo/semantics/article