Optical recognition of psaltic Byzantine chant notation

This paper describes a document recognition system for the modern neume based notation of Byzantine music. We propose algorithms for page segmentation, lyrics removal, syntactical symbol grouping and the determination of characteristic page dimensions. All algorithms are experimentally evaluated on a variety of printed books for which we also give an optimal feature set for a nearest neighbour classifier. The system is based on the Gamera framework for document image analysis. Given that we cover all aspects of the recognition process, the paper can also serve as an illustration how a recognition system for a non standard document type can be designed from scratch.