The meanings of certain acronyms and abbreviations used herein are given in Table 1.
TABLE 1Acronyms and AbbreviationsCPUCentral Processing UnitHDDHard Disk DriveHMMHidden Markov ModelOMROptical Music Recognition
Optical music recognition (OMR) is a specialized form of optical mark recognition in which documentary features of musical scores are recognized and analyzed. A musical score is essentially a concisely encoded medium, whereby a composer attempts to communicate his/her concepts of a musical composition and his instructions on its performance.
One difficulty with OMR results from the fact that the conventions of musical scores, in contrast to modern data communications protocols, lack a rigorous specification in matters such as spacing and demarcation of sequences of elements. Indeed, composers sometimes inadvertently or intentionally violate score conventions. The consequences of such anomalies, while understandable and compensated by a skilled performer, nevertheless can confound the ability of OMR applications to reliably provide features enabled by a digital score, e.g., Midi playback, score-following, and clean annotations.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,067,682 to Chen-Shyurng et al, which is herein incorporated by reference, proposes a technique, wherein a music score is detected and at least one measure in the music score is obtained by searching bar lines, so as to plan a recognition order according to the position of each measure in the music score. Next, an image capturing apparatus is controlled to capture one of the measures according to the recognition order, and music information in the captured measure is recognized and outputted immediately. The method follows the recognition order to perform the steps of controlling the image apparatus repeatedly, recognizing the captured measure, and outputting the music information on the other measures until each of the measures has been processed.