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

We present the development of a 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 system, and propose algorithms for the recognition of the 71 distinct character classes, based on wavelets, 4-projections and other structural and statistical features. Using a simple nearest neighbor classifier and a tree-structured classification schema, an accuracy of 99.3% was achieved, in a database of about 18000 Byzantine music character patterns.