Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Reading Music Systems

The International Workshop on Reading Music Systems (WoRMS) is a workshop that tries to connect researchers who develop systems for reading music, such as in the field of Optical Music Recognition, with other researchers and practitioners that could benefit from such systems, like librarians or musicologists. The relevant topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not limited to: Music reading systems; Optical music recognition; Datasets and performance evaluation; Image processing on music scores; Writer identification; Authoring, editing, storing and presentation systems for music scores; Multi-modal systems; Novel input-methods for music to produce written music; Web-based Music Information Retrieval services; Applications and projects; Use-cases related to written music. These are the proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Reading Music Systems, held in Milan, Italy on Nov. 4th 2023.

Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Reading Music Systems

The International Workshop on Reading Music Systems (WoRMS) is a workshop that tries to connect researchers who develop systems for reading music, such as in the field of Optical Music Recognition, with other researchers and practitioners that could benefit from such systems, like librarians or musicologists. The relevant topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not limited to: Music reading systems; Optical music recognition; Datasets and performance evaluation; Image processing on music scores; Writer identification; Authoring, editing, storing and presentation systems for music scores; Multi-modal systems; Novel input-methods for music to produce written music; Web-based Music Information Retrieval services; Applications and projects; Use-cases related to written music. These are the proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Reading Music Systems, held online on Nov. 18th 2022.

DoReMi: First glance at a universal OMR dataset

The main challenges of Optical Music Recognition (OMR) come from the nature of written music, its complexity and the difficulty of finding an appropriate data representation. This paper provides a first look at DoReMi, an OMR dataset that addresses these challenges, and a baseline object detection model to assess its utility. Researchers often approach OMR following a set of small stages, given that existing data often do not satisfy broader research. We examine the possibility of changing this tendency by presenting more metadata. Our approach complements existing research; hence DoReMi allows harmonisation with two existing datasets, DeepScores and MUSCIMA++. DoReMi was generated using a music notation software and includes over 6400 printed sheet music images with accompanying metadata useful in OMR research. Our dataset provides OMR metadata, MIDI, MEI, MusicXML and PNG files, each aiding a different stage of OMR. We obtain 64% mean average precision (mAP) in object detection using half of the data. Further work includes re-iterating through the creation process to satisfy custom OMR models. While we do not assume to have solved the main challenges in OMR, this dataset opens a new course of discussions that would ultimately aid that goal.

Optical Music Recognition: State of the Art and Major Challenges

Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is concerned with transcribing sheet music into a machine-readable format. The transcribed copy should allow musicians to compose, play and edit music by taking a picture of a music sheet. Complete transcription of sheet music would also enable more efficient archival. OMR facilitates examining sheet music statistically or searching for patterns of notations, thus helping use cases in digital musicology too. Recently, there has been a shift in OMR from using conventional computer vision techniques towards a deep learning approach. In this paper, we review relevant works in OMR, including fundamental methods and significant outcomes, and highlight different stages of the OMR pipeline. These stages often lack standard input and output representation and standardised evaluation. Therefore, comparing different approaches and evaluating the impact of different processing methods can become rather complex. This paper provides recommendations for future work, addressing some of the highlighted issues and represents a position in furthering this important field of research.