An optical music recognition system for the notation of the Orthodox Hellenic Byzantine Music

In this paper we present, for the first time, the development of a new system for the off-line optical recognition of the characters of the Orthodox Hellenic Byzantine Music Notation, that has been established since 1814. We describe the structure of the new system, and propose algorithms for the recognition of the 71 distinct character classes, based on Wavelets, 4-projections and other and statistical features. Using a simple Nearest Neighbor classifier and a tree-structured classification schema, the accuracy of 99.3 % was achieved, in a database of about 18,000 Byzantine music character patterns. The development of such a system is of great importance to musicologists, especially in our days, which are marked by an increased interest, world wide, for the study and understanding of Eastern type musical forms.