Automatic Score Extraction with Optical Music Recognition (OMR)

Optical music recognition (OMR ) describes the process of automatically transcribing music notation from a digital image. Although similar to optical character recognition (OCR ), the process and procedures of OMR diverge due to the fundamental differences between text and music notation, such as the two-dimensional nature of the notation system and the overlay of music symbols on top of staff lines. The OMR process can be described as a sequence of steps, with techniques adapted from disciplines including image processing, machine learning, grammars, and notation encoding. The sequence and specific techniques used can differ depending on the condition of the image, the type of notation, and the desired output.

Several commercial and open-source OMR software systems have been available since the mid-1990s. Most of them are designed to be used by individuals and recognize common (post-18th-century) Western music notation, though there have been some efforts to recognize other types of music notation such as for the lute and for earlier Western music.

Even though traditional applications of OMR have focused on small-scale recognition tasks, typically as an automated method of musical entry for score editing, new applications of large-scale OMR are under development, where automated recognition is the central technology for building full-music search systems, similar to the large-scale full-text recognition efforts.