Pugin, L., Hockman, J., Burgoyne, J.A., Fujinaga, I., 2008.

Gamera versus aruspix two optical music recognition approaches

Optical music recognition (OMR) applications are predominantly designed for common music notation and as such, are inherently incapable of adapting to specialized notation forms within early music. Two OMR systems, namely Gamut (a Gamera application) and Aruspix, have been proposed for early music. In this paper, we present a novel comparison of the two systems, which use markedly different approaches to solve the same problem, and pay close attention to the performance and learning rates of both applications. In order to obtain a complete comparison of Gamut and Aruspix, we evaluated the core recognition systems and the pitch determination processes separately. With our experiments, we were able to highlight the advantages of both approaches as well as causes of problems and possibilities for future improvements.