HMM-based writer identification in music score documents without staff-line removal

Writer identification from musical score documents is a challenging task due to its inherent problem of overlapping of musical symbols with staff-lines. Most of the existing works in the literature of writer identification in musical score documents were performed after a pre-processing stage of staff-lines removal. In this paper we propose a novel writer identification framework in musical score documents without removing staff-lines from the documents. In our approach, Hidden Markov Model (HMM) has been used to model the writing style of the writers without removing staff-lines. The sliding window features are extracted from musical score-lines and they are used to build writer specific HMM models. Given a query musical sheet, writer specific confidence for each musical line is returned by each writer specific model using a log-likelihood score. Next, a log-likelihood score in page level is computed by weighted combination of these scores from the corresponding line images of the page. A novel Factor Analysis-based feature selection technique is applied in sliding window features to reduce the noise appearing from staff-lines which proves efficiency in writer identification performance. In our framework we have also proposed a novel score-line detection approach in musical sheet using HMM. The experiment has been performed in CVC-MUSCIMA data set and the results obtained show that the proposed approach is efficient for score-line detection and writer identification without removing staff-lines. To get the idea of computation time of our method, detail analysis of execution time is also provided.