Abstract Optical music recognition (OMR) is the field that studies how to automatically read music notation from score images. One of the relevant steps within the OMR workflow is the staff-region retrieval. This process is a key step because any undetected staff will not be processed by the subsequent steps. This task has previously been addressed as a supervised learning problem in the literature; however, ground-truth data are not always available, so each new manuscript requires a preliminary manual annotation. This situation is one of the main bottlenecks in OMR, because of the countless number of existing manuscripts , and the associated manual labeling cost. With the aim of mitigating this issue, we propose the application of a domain adaptation technique, the so-called Domain-Adversarial Neural Network (DANN), based on a combination of a gradient reversal layer and a domain classifier in the inference neural architecture. The results from our experiments support the benefits of our proposed solution, obtaining improvements of approximately 29% in the F-score.

A music retrieval system is introduced that incorporate tempo, cultural, and beat strength features to help music therapists provide appropriate music for gait training for Parkinson's patients. Unlike current methods available to music therapists (e.g., personal CD/MP3 library search) we propose a domain-specific search engine that utilizes database of music found on YouTube. We independently evaluate the efficacy of our tempo, cultural, and beat strength features on a music database extracted from YouTube. Results from our user study demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of our search engine for this application.

This paper presents a quantitative comparison of different algorithms for the removal of stafflines from music images. It contains a survey of previously proposed algorithms and suggests a new skeletonization based approach. We define three different error metrics, compare the algorithms with respect to these metrics and measure their robustness with respect to certain image defects. Our test images are computer-generated scores on which we apply various image deformations typically found in real-world data. In addition to modern western music notation our test set also includes historic music notation such as mensural notation and lute tablature. Our general approach and evaluation methodology is not specific to staff removal, but applicable to other segmentation problems as well.