Title: Optical Music Recognition with Convolutional Sequence-to-Sequence Models,
Abstract: Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is an important technology within Music
Information Retrieval. Deep learning models show promising results on OMR
tasks, but symbol-level annotated data sets of sufficient size to train such
models are not available and difficult to develop. We present a deep learning
architecture called a Convolutional Sequence-to-Sequence model to both move
towards an end-to-end trainable OMR pipeline, and apply a learning process that
trains on full sentences of sheet music instead of individually labeled
symbols. The model is trained and evaluated on a human generated data set, with
various image augmentations based on real-world scenarios. This data set is the
first publicly available set in OMR research with sufficient size to train and
evaluate deep learning models. With the introduced augmentations a pitch
recognition accuracy of 81% and a duration accuracy of 94% is achieved,
resulting in a note level accuracy of 80%. Finally, the model is compared to
commercially available methods, showing a large improvements over these
applications.