Introduction to Optical Music Recognition: Overview and Practical Challenges

Music has been always an integral part of human culture. In our computer age, it is not surprising that there is a growing interest to store music in a digitized form. Optical music recognition (OMR) refers to a discipline that investigates music score recognition systems. This is similar to well-known optical character recognition systems, except OMR systems try to automatically transform scanned sheet music into a computer-readable format. In such a digital format, semantic information is also stored (instrumentation, notes, pitches and duration, contextual information, etc.). This article introduces the OMR field and presents an overview of the relevant literature and basic techniques. Practical challenges and questions arising from the automatic recognition of music notation and its semantic interpretation are discussed as well as the most important open issues.