Note onset detection for the transcription of polyphonic piano music

Transcription of music is the process of generating a symbolic representation such as a score sheet or a MIDI file from an audio recording of a piece of music. A statistical machine learning approach for detecting note onsets in polyphonic piano music is presented. An area from the spectrogram of the sound is concatenated into one feature vector. A cascade of boosted classifiers is used for dimensionality reduction and classification in an one-versus-all manner. The presented system achieves an accuracy of 87.4% in onset detection outperforming the best comparison system by 25.1 %.