Offline Hand-Written Musical Symbol Recognition

Recognition of offline musical symbols can aid in automatic retrieval of a particular piece of musical notation from a digital repository. Though some work on on-line Musical symbol notations exists, little work has been done on off-line recognition of the symbols. This article proposes a system for offline isolated musical symbol recognition. Efficacy of a texture analysis based feature extraction method is compared with a structural shape descriptor based feature extraction method coupled with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Later three different kinds of feature selection techniques were also analyzed to gauge the contribution of each feature in the overall classification process. We compared our results with an existing method and we noted the proposed system exhibited encouraging results and it is better than existing method. The proposed system even worked better when we used MQDF classifier in place of SVM. In a five-fold cross validation experimental framework, considering 3795 music symbols we achieved 97.50% and 98.05% accuracy from SVM and MQDF classifiers, respectively when chain-code histogram features are applied.