Identifying music documents in a collection of images

Digital libraries and search engines are now well-equipped to find images of documents based on queries. Many images of music scores are now available, often mixed up with textual documents and images. For example, using the Google “images” search feature, a search for “Beethoven” will return a number of scores and manuscripts as well as pictures of the composer. In this paper we report on an investigation into methods to mechanically determine if a particular document is indeed a score, so that the user can specify that only musical scores should be returned. The goal is to find a minimal set of features that can be used as a quick test that will be applied to large numbers of documents. A variety of filters were considered, and two promising ones (run-length ratios and Hough transform) were evaluated. We found that a method based around run-lengths in vertical scans (RL) that out-performs a comparable algorithm using the Hough transform (HT). On a test set of 1030 images, RL achieved recall and precision of 97.8% and 88.4% respectively while HT achieved 97.8% and 73.5%. In terms of processor time, RL was more than five times as fast as HT.