How to Exploit Music Notation Syntax for OMR?

A major roadblock for Optical Music Recognition, especially for handwritten music notation, is symbol detection: recovering the locations of musical symbols from the input page. This has been attempted both with bottom-up approaches exploiting visual features, and top-down approaches based on the strong constraints that music notation syntax imposes on possible symbol configurations; sometimes joined together at appropriate points in the recognition process. The bottom-up approach has recently greatly improved with the boom of neural networks. However, the reduction in uncertainty that music notation syntax can provide has not yet been married to the power of these neural network models. This extended abstract brainstorms ways in which this can be done, and analyzes the difficulties the various combined approaches will have to address. We hope our work will foster further discussion to clarify the issues involed, provoke OMR researchers to try some of these approaches experimentally, and entice researchers from other parts of the graphics recognition community to share relevant experience.