[[alternative]]Automatic Optical Music Score Recognition

[[abstract]]This paper addresses the problem of taking printed sheet music and translating it into a MIDI format computer file. The automatic optical music score recognition system provides a more efficient and convenient approach of converting printed sheet music into MIDI file. The system recognizes music scores in a two-step process: (1) music symbol detection phase, which obtains a digitized image of the sheet music and recognizes the musical notations in the digitized image; and (2) music symbol emendation phase, which uses musical knowledge to correct the mis-identified musical symbols and then outputs the result to a pre-defined intermediary format file. The output file contains information of music symbols and confidence level values, these information could be displayed through a musical editor system developed for this research.Position and scale of the sheet music on the scanner is not restricted. After analyzing the sheet music, most of the music symbols could be recognized with only single image processing techniques. The experiments show a 91.2% recognition rate is achievable at 100 dpi taking approximately 1 minute per page. At 150 dpi, it is about 92.5% with an average processing time of 2 minute per page. At 300 dpi, the recognition rate is raised to 93.4% with an average processing time of 10 minute per page.