Processing of Byzantine Neume Notation in Ancient Historical Manuscripts

Abstract

Byzantine neume notation is a specific form of note script, used by the Orthodox Christian Church since ancient times until nowadays for writing music and musical forms in sacred documents. Such documents are an object of extensive scientific research and naturally with the development of computer and information technologies the need of a software tool which can assist these efforts is needed. In this paper a set of algorithms for processing and analysis of Byzantine neume notation are presented which include document image segmentation, character feature vector extraction, classifier learning and character recognition. The described algorithms are implemented as an integrated scientific software system.