Glyph and Position Classification of Music Symbols in Early Music Manuscripts

摘要

Optical Music Recognition is a field of research that automates the reading of musical scores so as to transcribe their content into a structured digital format. When dealing with music manuscripts, the traditional workflow establishes separate stages of detection and classification of musical symbols. In the latter, most of the research has focused on detecting musical glyphs, ignoring that the meaning of a musical symbol is defined by two components: its glyph and its position within the staff. In this paper we study how to perform both glyph and position classification of handwritten musical symbols in early music manuscripts written in white Mensural notation, a common notation system used for the most part of the XVI and XVII centuries. We make use of Con-volutional Neural Networks as the classification method, and we tested several alternatives such as using independent models for each component, combining label spaces, or using both multi-input and multi-output models. Our results on early music manuscripts provide insights about the effectiveness and efficiency of each approach.