Symbol classification approach for OMR of square notation manuscripts

Researchers in the field of OMR (Optical Music Recognition) have acknowledged that the automatic transcription of medieval musical manuscripts is still an open problem [2, 3], mainly due to lack of standards in notation and the physical quality of the documents. Nonetheless, the amount of medieval musical manuscripts is so vast that the consensus seems to be that OMR can be a vital tool to help in the preserving and sharing of this information in digital format. In this paper we report our results on a preliminary approach to OMR of medieval plainchant manuscripts in square notation, at the symbol classification level, which produced good results in the recognition of eight basic symbols. Our preliminary approach consists of the preprocessing, segmentation, and classification stages.