Prospects for Improving OMR with Multiple Recognizers

OMR (Optical Music Recognition) programs have been available for years, but they still leave much to be desired in terms of accuracy. We studied the feasibility of achieving substantially better accuracy by using the output of several programs to “triangulate” and get better results than any of the individual programs; this multiplerecognizer approach has had some success with other media but, to our knowledge, has never been tried for music. A major obstacle is that the complexity of music notation is such that evaluating OMR accuracy is difficult for any but the simplest music. Nonetheless, existing programs have serious enough limitations that the multiplerecognizer approach is promising.