A new optical music recognition system based on combined neural network

•We propose a new OMR system to recognize the music symbols without segmentation.•A new classifier named combined neural network (CNN) is presented.•Tests conducted on 15 pages of music sheets show that the proposed method constitutes an interesting contribution to OMR.•The combined neural network (CNN) offers superior classification capability.

Optical music recognition (OMR) is an important tool to recognize a scanned page of music sheet automatically, which has been applied to preserving music scores. In this paper, we propose a new OMR system to recognize the music symbols without segmentation. We present a new classifier named combined neural network (CNN) that offers superior classification capability. We conduct tests on fifteen pages of music sheets, which are real and scanned images. The tests show that the proposed method constitutes an interesting contribution to OMR.