Domain Adaptation for Handwritten Symbol Recognition: A Case of Study in Old Music Manuscripts

The existence of a large amount of untranscripted music manuscripts has caused initiatives that use Machine Learning (ML) for Optical Music Recognition, in order to efficiently transcribe the music sources into a machine-readable format. Although most music manuscript are similar in nature, they inevitably vary from one another. This fact can negatively influence the complexity of the classification task because most ML models fail to transfer their knowledge from one domain to another, thereby requiring learning from scratch on new domains after manually labeling new data. This work studies the ability of a Domain Adversarial Neural Network for domain adaptation in the context of classifying handwritten music symbols. The main idea is to exploit the knowledge of a specific manuscript to classify symbols from different (unlabeled) manuscripts. The reported results are promising, obtaining a substantial improvement over a conventional Convolutional Neural Network approach, which can be used as a basis for future research.