Software developed by INESC TEC wins international competition

This system recognises handwritten musical scores which, contrarily to printed scores, are more complex as the notation varies according to each musician, and probably in the same score the lines and symbols have different sizes, shapes and intensity.

The software was developed by Ana Rebelo, a researcher at INESC TEC’s Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit (UTM), as part of her PhD studies and within project “Optical Recognition System for Handwritten Music Scores”, financed by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). The goal of the software is to obtain a digital and easy to use version of the score, making it possible to preserve it, using algorithms to detect lines, and to detect and recognise music symbols.

The system developed by the INESC TEC researcher was submitted to the GREC 2013 – Competition on Music Scores, which took place as part of this international conference. Throughout the competition, the software had to analyse images from different scores reproducing the deteriorations that are normally found in ancient and degraded scores, obtaining the best performance.

Ana Rebelo concluded her PhD in October 2012. Her dissertation was entitled Robust optical recognition of handwritten musical scores based on domain knowledge, and her work was supervised by Jaime Cardoso, also a researcher at UTM.