Avoiding staff removal stage in optical music recognition: application to scores written in white mensural notation

Staff detection and removal is one of the most important issues in optical music recognition (OMR) tasks since common approaches for symbol detection and classification are based on this process. Due to its complexity, staff detection and removal is often inaccurate, leading to a great number of errors in posterior stages. For this reason, a new approach that avoids this stage is proposed in this paper, which is expected to overcome these drawbacks. Our approach is put into practice in a case of study focused on scores written in white mensural notation. Symbol detection is performed by using the vertical projection of the staves. The cross-correlation operator for template matching is used at the classification stage. The goodness of our proposal is shown in an experiment in which our proposal attains an extraction rate of 96 % and a classification rate of 92 %, on average. The results found have reinforced the idea of pursuing a new research line in OMR systems without the need of the removal of staff lines.