Music OCR

Optical Music Recognition (English: Optical Music Recognition, abbreviated as OMR) is a form of optical character recognition, are digitized at the printed notes, to edit it later with a music notation program or play (MIDI).

History

End of the 1960s was for the first time at MIT and other research explores the recognition of printed sheet music sets. It tries to capture staves to recognize and translate the symbols was lying on it. The first commercial note recognition program Midi scan was published in 1991 by the company Musitek ( The program was later renamed in SmartScore ).

Today, there are a plurality of touch scanning programs. They are often involved in music notation programs via the interface and can be called directly from these. Although the full versions usually have to be purchased separately, but already includes touch software when buying often a light version of the corresponding program for the optical detection of notes.

Method

In contrast to the optical recognition of text in which characters can be recorded in sequence, continuous parallel elements and unbound dynamic symbols must be detected at central sets. Therefore, the detection of the spatial arrangement of notes, dynamics, fingerings, the stresses and other additional notation elements is an important point in the optical detection of notes.

Is read directly from a connected PC to the scanner or from an image file ( BMP and TIFF). Some programs are also able to read PDF files with notes. Output formats for the exchange are usually MusicXML, MIDI or NIFF.

The rate of recognition is limited, depending on the quality of the scanned document is to be expected occurrence of errors that must be corrected manually. However, Modern Optical Music Recognition programs have in an ordinary printed music notation a high accuracy of up to 99 percent. The most common errors arise from artifacts in the scanned image file or small, point-like particles of dirt on the scan template, which interprets the music recognition program as staccato dots or puncture of a note.

Scans of handwritten notes - if at all - only major errors detected.

List and comparison of Note scan Software

The market leader in Germany are commercial programs PhotoScore, SmartScore, Capella - Scan and SharpEye. With Audiveris also a program written in Java open source program that is now available in version 3.3 (for Windows and Linux) exists.

Comparison of dominant note scan programs

Another note scan programs

  • Audiveris Music Scanner
  • Forte Scanlight
  • Gamera
  • MIDI Connection Scan
  • Mozart scan
  • MP scan
  • OMeR ( Optical Music easy Reader)
  • PDFtoMusic Pro Music Scanner
  • Score Maker
  • Score scan
Notation Interchange File Format Capella (notation program) Sibelius (Software) Finale (Software) ABBYY Music Information Retrieval
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