#BYZANTINE MUSIC NOTATION SOFTWARE SOFTWARE#

We studied several feature extraction techniques and developed methodologies that efficiently combine different types of features. At the recognition stage a feature vector is extracted for all extracted characters in order to classify them to predefined classes using machine learning techniques. In this thesis we studied the processing and focused on the recognition stages for handwritten optical character recognition. So, the recognition of handwritten documents is still a subject of active research. However, handwritten character recognition is comparatively difficult. A lot of commercial products are focused towards that direction, achieving high recognition rates. Nowadays, the accurate recognition of machine printed characters is considered largely a solved problem. An analytic experiment using a commercial OCR engine applied to a historical book is also presented. Experimental results prove that using the proposed technique, the percentage of time saved for the text line, word and character segmentation ground truth creation is more than 90%. The semi-automatic procedure for detecting the ground truth regions has been evaluated and proved efficient and time saving. The proposed methodology consists of (i) a semiautomatic procedure in order to detect the text line, word and character segmentation ground truth regions making use of the correct document transcription, (ii) calculation of proper evaluation metrics in order to measure the performance of the final OCR result as well as of the intermediate segmentation stages. For this purpose, we efficiently create the text line, word and character segmentation ground truth guided by the transcription of the historical documents. We aim to evaluate not only the final noisy recognition result but also the main intermediate stages of text line, word and character segmentation. In this paper, we propose a new comprehensive methodology in order to evaluate the performance of noisy historical document recognition techniques. So is the examined case - automated and possibly automatic computer analysis and recognition of neume musical notation in old historical documents. In each of these problems there is a concrete specific characteristic which is used for its solution but also impede the standard OCR techniques to solve them.

On the other hand, a lot of other examples of non -standard OCR problems are known, some of them successfully solved (7), for example, for texts written in old alp habets, classical musical notation and so on. Also, the difficulties connected with processing old manuscripts of poor image quality are not considered. His method gives good results for printed documents, created after 1814 but there is no research for older handwritten documents. Another important reason for research in this direction is the fact that very few attempts to build such systems were made, like the work of Gezerlis (1, 2). The special characteristics of neume notation is the reason why its computer recognition is a difficult process whose investigation will lead to improvement of the existing document image processing methods and development of new ones, and also will give a useful tool in the hands of scientists who investigate these manuscripts. In this sense, documents which contain neume notation (bibles, medleys of psalms, etc.) are reach source of material for experiments. These difficulties make the problem of processing old documents a challenging task. Unfortunately these tools cannot process successfully historical documents for a number of reasons: bad quality of the document image, non-standard alphabets, and the old documents are handwritten.

#BYZANTINE MUSIC NOTATION SOFTWARE SOFTWARE#

A number of commercial software packages were created which successfully transform scanned document image to a text file (usually in ASCII format) if the document is written in a standard alphabet (Latin, Cyrillic, etc.) and is with good quality. During the last years a lot of investigation s in the field of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and Document Image Processing have been made. In this paper we present an overview of the methods, which can be used to create a system for automated recognition of neumes. Such software can be OCR (Optical Character Recognition) based which will help the analyses of the neume notation in the scanned historical documents. This causes the natural need of a software package which can help these investigations. The big varieties of preserved historical documents, which contain neumes give reach material for investigations in fields like history, cultural sciences, etc. Neume musical notation is a type of writing of Christian Orthodox Church chant originated in Ancient Byzantium, which is still used by the Orthodox Church.

Byzantine music notation software