An Effective Staff Detection and Removal Technique for Musical Documents

Musical staff line detection and removal techniques detect the staff positions in musical documents and segment musical score from musical documents by removing those staff lines. It is an important preprocessing step for ensuing the Optical Music Recognition tasks. This paper proposes an effective staff line detection and removal method that makes use of the global information of the musical document and models the staff line shape. It first estimates the staff height and space, and then models the shape of the staff line by examining the orientation of the staff pixels. At last the estimated model is used to find out the location of staff lines and hence to remove those detected staff lines. The proposed technique is simple, robust, and involves few parameters. It has been tested on the dataset of the recent staff removal competition held under the International Conference of Document Analysis and Recognition(ICDAR) 2011. Experimental results show the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed technique on musical documents with various types of deformations.