Handwritten Musical Document Retrieval Using Music-Score Spotting

In this paper, we present a novel approach for retrieval of handwritten musical documents using a query sequence/word of musical scores. In our algorithm, the musical score-words are described as sequences of symbols generated from a universal codebook vocabulary of musical scores. Staff lines are removed first from musical documents using structural analysis of staff lines and symbol codebook vocabulary is created in offline. Next, using this symbol codebook the music symbol information in each document image is encoded. Given a query sequence of musical symbols in a musical score-line, the symbols in the query are searched in each of these encoded documents. Finally, a sub-string matching algorithm is applied to find query words. For codebook, two different feature extraction methods namely: Zernike Moments and 400 dimensional gradient features are tested and two unsupervised classifiers using SOM and K-Mean are evaluated. The results are compared with a baseline approach of DTW. The performance is measured on a collection of handwritten musical documents and results are promising.