Recognition and reconstruction of primitives in music scores

Music recognition bears similarities and differences to OCR. In this paper we identify some of the problems peculiar to musical scores, and propose an approach which succeeds in a wide range of non-trivial cases. The composer customarily proceeds by writing notes, then stems, beams, ties and slurs - we have inverted this approach by segmenting and then subsegmenting scores to recapture the component parts of symbols. In this paper, we concentrate on the strategy of recognizing sub-segmented primitives, and the reassembly process which reconstructs low level graphical primitives back to musical symbols. The sub-segmentation process proves to be worthwhile, since many primitives complement each other and high level musical theory can be employed to enhance the recognition process.