Online recognition of handwritten music symbols

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an effective online method to recognize handwritten music symbols. Based on the fact that most music symbols can be regarded as combinations of several basic strokes, the proposed method first classifies all the strokes comprising an input symbol and then recognizes the symbol based on the results of stroke classification. For stroke classification, we propose to use three types of features, which are the size information, the histogram of directional movement angles, and the histogram of undirected movement angles. When combining classified strokes into a music symbol, we utilize their sizes and spatial relation together with their combination. The proposed method is evaluated using two datasets including HOMUS, one of the largest music symbol datasets. As a result, it achieves a significant improvements of about 10% in recognition rates compared to the state-of-the-art method for the datasets. This shows the superiority of the proposed method in online handwritten music symbol recognition.