# A Unified Representation Framework for the Evaluation of Optical Music Recognition Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.12908 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12908/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Understanding Optical Music Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03608/) (2019)
- [Multi-Scale Attention with Dense Encoder for Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03530/) (2018)
- [The 1st Tiny Object Detection Challenge:Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07506/) (2020)
- [DeepScores -- A Dataset for Segmentation, Detection and Classification of Tiny Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00525/) (2018)
- [DoReMi: First glance at a universal OMR dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07786/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of End-to-End Polyphonic Optical Music Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01769/) (2021)
- [Listen to Your Favorite Melodies with img2Mxml, Producing MusicXML from Sheet Music Image by Measure-based Multimodal Deep Learning-driven Assembly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12037/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Sheet Music Transformer: End-To-End Optical Music Recognition Beyond Monophonic Transcription](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07596/) (2024)
- [MusiXQA: Advancing Visual Music Understanding in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23009/) (2025)
- [Toward a More Complete OMR Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00316/) (2024)
- [Optical Music Recognition for Real-World Manuscripts with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09479/) (2026)
- [GAN-based Content-Conditioned Generation of Handwritten Musical Symbols](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17869/) (2025)
- [From Image to Music Language: A Two-Stage Structure Decoding Approach for Complex Polyphonic OMR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20522/) (2026)
- [A Dataset for the Recognition of Historical and Handwritten Music Scores in Western Notation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18436/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern-day Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is a fairly fragmented field. Most OMR approaches use datasets that are independent and incompatible between each other, making it difficult to both combine them and compare recognition systems built upon them. In this paper we identify the need of a common music representation language and propose the Music Tree Notation (MTN) format, with the idea to construct a common endpoint for OMR research that allows coordination, reuse of technology and fair evaluation of community efforts. This format represents music as a set of primitives that group together into higher-abstraction nodes, a compromise between the expression of fully graph-based and sequential notation formats. We have also developed a specific set of OMR metrics and a typeset score dataset as a proof of concept of this idea.