Optical Music Recognition: Recent Advances, Current Challenges, and Future Directions.

Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is an interdisciplinary field that aims to automate the process of transcribing sheet music into a digital format. Over the past few years, significant progress has been made in developing OMR systems that can recognize musical symbols with high accuracy. However, completing the pipeline of OMR remains a challenging endeavor due to the complexity and variability of music notation, and there are several open challenges that need to be addressed. In this position paper, we provide an overview of the current state-of-the-art in OMR through the two main lines of research. We include the problems that have been recently addressed and the techniques that have been considered. We then identify the key challenges that remain, such as learning to reconstruct the music notation, recognizing multiple voices, or dealing with artifacts such as lyrics. Finally, we suggest some possible directions for future research. We argue that addressing these challenges is crucial to making OMR a more practical and useful tool for musicians, scholars, and librarians alike.