Towards a Standard Testbed for Optical Music Recognition: Definitions, Metrics, and Page Images

One example of such a field is text information retrieval (IR), where the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) has annually-renewed IR tasks with accompanying data sets. In music informatics, the Music Information Retrieval Exchange (MIREX), with its annual tests and meetings held during the ISMIR conference, is a close analog to TREC; but MIREX has never had an OMR track or a collection of music such a track could employ.

We describe why the absence of an OMR testbed is a problem and how this problem may be mitigated. To aid in the establishment of a standard testbed, we provide (1) a set of definitions for the complexity of music notation; (2) a set of performance metrics for OMR tools that gauge score complexity and graphical quality; and (3) a small corpus of music for use as a baseline for a proper OMR testbed.