Glyph and Position Classification of Music Symbols in Early Manuscripts

In this research, we study how to classify of handwritten music symbols in early music manuscripts written in white Mensural notation, a common notation system used since the fourteenth century and until the Renaissance. The field of Optical Music Recognition researches how to automate the reading of musical scores to transcribe its content to a structured digital format such as MIDI. When dealing with music manuscripts, the traditional workflow establishes two separate stages of detection and classification of musical symbols. In the classification stage, most of the research focuses on detecting musical symbols, without taking into account that a musical note is defined in two components: glyph and its position with respect to the staff. Our purpose will consist of the design and implementation of architectures in the field of Deep Learning, using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) as well as its evaluation and comparison to determine which model provides the best performance in terms of efficiency and precision for its implementation in an interactive scenario