MUSCIMA++ is a dataset of handwritten music notation for musical symbol detection. It contains 91255 symbols, consisting of both notation primitives and higher-level notation objects, such as key signatures or time signatures. There are 23352 notes in the dataset, of which 21356 have a full notehead, 1648 have an empty notehead, and 348 are grace notes. For each annotated object in an image, we provide both the bounding box, and a pixel mask that defines exactly which pixels within the bounding box belong to the given object. Composite constructions, such as notes, are captured through explicitly annotated relationships of the notation primitives (noteheads, stems, beams...), thus forming the MUSCIMA++ Notation Graph, or MuNG. This way, the annotation provides an explicit bridge between the low-level and high-level symbols described in Optical Music Recognition literature.
MUSCIMA++ has annotations for 140 images from the CVC-MUSCIMA dataset [2], used for handwritten music notation writer identification and staff removal. CVC-MUSCIMA consists of 1000 binary images: 20 pages of music were each re-written by 50 musicians, binarized, and staves were removed. We had 7 different annotators marking musical symbols: each annotator marked one of each 20 CVC-MUSCIMA pages, with the writers selected so that the 140 images cover 2-3 images from each of the 50 CVC-MUSCIMA writers. This setup ensures maximal variability of handwriting, given the limitations in annotation resources.
The MUSCIMA++ dataset is intended for musical symbol detection and classification, and for music notation reconstruction. A thorough description of its design is published on arXiv. The full definition of MuNG, the ground truth format, is given in the form of annotator instructions.
Watch Jan give a 30 minute introduction into this dataset on YouTube:
Apart from the symbol annotation data themselves, we also provide two Python packages:
muscima, which is basically an I/O interface to the v1.0 dataset (also available through pip install muscima)mung, which is the same asmuscimabut for v2.0+MUSCIMarker, which is the annotation tool used to create the dataset.
We believe the functionality in mung will make it easier for you to use the dataset. You don’t need MUSCIMarker unless you want to extend the dataset, although it is also nifty for visualization. If you do not want to use the Python interface, you can of course make your own: the data is stored as a regular XML file, described in detail in the README (and also in the mung.io module).
To understand how to leverage the dataset for your particular use case, you will need to familiarize yourself with how the MuNG ground truth is defined in detail. To this end, see the annotation instructions as a reference guide. If you want to look at the notation graph, you can use the MUSCIMarker GUI app.
As a part of the agreement that enabled us to release MUSCIMA++ under a permissive license, we do not directly distribute the underlying CVC-MUSCIMA images themselves, only the annotations. To get these underlying images, you will need to download the CVC-MUSCIMA staff removal dataset.
However, for convenience reasons, the omrdatasettools package contains a simple script that can download the MUSCIMA++ dataset and the respective images jointly.
We annotated notation primitives (noteheads, stems, beams, barlines), as well as higher-level, “semantic” objects (key signatures, voltas, measure separators). For each annotated object in an image, we provide both the bounding box, and a pixel mask that defines exactly which pixels within the bounding box belong to the given object.
In addition to the objects, we annotate their relationships. The relationships are oriented edges that generally encode attachment: a stem is attached to a notehead, a sharp is attached to a key signature, or a barline is attached to a repeat sign.
We purposefully did not annotate notes, as what constitutes a note on paper is not well-defined, and what is traditionally considered a “note” graphical object does not map well onto the musical concept of a “note” with a pitch, duration, amplitude, and timbre. Instead of defining graphical note objects, we define relationships between notation primitives, so that the musical notes can be deterministically reconstructed. Notehead primitives (noteheadFull, notehead-empty, and their grace note counterparts) should provide a 1:1 interface to major notation semantics representations such as MusicXML or MEI.
Formally, the annotation is a directed graph of notation objects, each of which is associated with a subset of foreground pixels in the annotated image. We do our best to keep this graph acyclic.
The full definition the MUSCIMA++ ground truth (current version 0.9) is captured in the annotation guidelines.
The dataset package has the following structure:
muscima-pp
|
+--+ v1.0/
| |
| +--+ data/ ... Contains the data files.
| | +--+ cropobjects_manual/ ... Contains the annotation files without automatically
| | | extracted staff objects and their relationships.
| | +--+ cropobjects_withstaff/ ... Contains the annotation files enriched by staff objects,
| | | inferred automatically from CVC-MUSCIMA staff-only images
| | | using scripts from the ``muscima’’ package.
| | | +-- CVC-MUSCIMA_W-01_N-10_D-ideal.xml
| | | +...
| | |
| | +--+ images/ ... Put corresponding CVC-MUSCIMA image files here.
| | (Analogously, use e.g. data/fulls/ for full images.)
| |
| +--+ specifications/ ... Contains the ground truth definition files for MUSCIMarker:
| | +-- cvc-muscima-image-list.txt ... list of CVC-MUSCIMA images used for annotation,
| | +-- mff-muscima-mlclasses-annot.xml ... list of object classes,
| | +-- mff-muscima-mlclasses-annot.deprules ... and list of rules governing their relationships.
| | +-- testset-dependent.txt ... List of writer-dependent test set images.
| | | (Same handwriting in training and test set.)
| | +-- testset-independent.txt ... List of writer-dependent test set images.
| | (Test set handwriting never seen in training set.)
+--+ v2.0/
| |
| +--+ data/ ... Contains the data files.
| | +--+ annotations/ ... Contains the annotation files enriched by staff objects,
| | | inferred automatically from CVC-MUSCIMA staff-only images
| | | using scripts from the ``mung’’ package.
| | +-- CVC-MUSCIMA_W-01_N-10_D-ideal.xml
| | +-- ...
| |
| +--+ specifications/ ... Contains the ground truth definition files for MUSCIMarker:
| +-- cvc-muscima-image-list.txt ... list of CVC-MUSCIMA images used for annotation,
| +-- mff-muscima-mlclasses-annot.xml ... list of object classes,
| +-- mff-muscima-mlclasses-annot.deprules ... and list of rules governing their relationships.
| +-- testset-dependent.txt ... List of writer-dependent test set images.
| | (Same handwriting in training and test set.)
| +-- testset-independent.txt ... List of writer-dependent test set images.
|
|
+-- LICENSE.txt ... The legal stuff (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0, which is fine
| unless you want to make money off of this data).
+-- ERRATA.txt ... File which lists errors in the data and their corrections.
+-- README.md ... This file.
+-- upgrade_v1.0_to_v2.0.py ... A script to upgrade existing annotations from version 1 to 2.
The MUSCIMA++ annotations are provided as XML files. The data itself is inside elements:
<Node>
<Id>25</Id>
<ClassName>grace-notehead-full</ClassName>
<Top>119</Top>
<Left>413</Left>
<Width>16</Width>
<Height>6</Height>
<Mask>1:5 0:11 (...) 1:4 0:6 1:5 0:1</Mask>
<Outlinks>12 24 26</Outlinks>
<Inlinks>13</Inlinks>
</Node>
The Nodes are themselves kept as a list, which is the top-level element in the data files:
<Nodes dataset="MUSCIMA-pp_2.0" document="CVC-MUSCIMA_W-01_N-10_D-ideal">
<Node> ... </Node>
<Node> ... </Node>
</Nodes>
NOTE: Parsing (muscima.io.parse_nodes_list()) is only implemented for files that consist of a single
<Nodes>list.
- Id is the integer ID of the Node inside a given (which generally corresponds to one XML file of Nodes -- see below for unique ID policy and dataset namespaces).
- ClassName is the name of the object's class (such as noteheadFull, beam, numeral_3, etc.).
- Top is the vertical coordinate of the upper left corner of the object's bounding box.
- Left is the horizontal coordinate of the upper left corner of the object's bounding box.
- Width: the width of the symbol
- Height: the height of the symbol
- Mask: a run-length-encoded binary (0/1) array that denotes the area within the Node's bounding box (specified by top, left, height and width) that the Node actually occupies. If the mask is not given, the object is understood to occupy the entire bounding box (within MUSCIMA++, all objects have explicit masks, but the format enables annotating bounding boxes only). The run-length encoding is obtained from a flattened version of the binary array in the C order, using the flatten() method of numpy arrays. (The mask lines might get quite long, but e.g. the lxml library has no problems with parsing them.)
- Inlinks: whitespace-separated objid list, representing Nodes from which a relationship leads to this Node. (Relationships are directed edges, forming a directed graph of Nodes.) The objids are valid in the same scope as the Node's objid: don't mix Nodes from multiple scopes (e.g., multiple NodeLists)! If you are using Nodes from multiple NodeLists at the same time, make sure to check against the uid.
- Outlinks: whitespace-separate objid list, representing Nodes to which a relationship leads to this Node. (Relationships are directed edges, forming a directed graph of Nodes.) The objids are valid in the same scope as the Node's objid: don't mix Nodes from multiple scopes (e.g., multiple NodeLists)! If you are using Nodes from multiple NodeLists at the same time, make sure to check against the uid.
The parser function provided for Nodes does not check against the presence of other sub-elements. You can therefore extend Nodes for your own purposes.
NOTE: The full description of the format is also given in the muscima package, module mung.Node. In case these two versions do not match, the authoritative document is the package documentation.
The ID field of each node has to be unique within the document!
MUSCIMA++ before version 2.0 had two separate IDs. A dataset-wide "unique ID", e.g., MUSCIMA-pp_1.0___CVC-MUSCIMA_W-01_N-10_D-ideal___0, and an integer "node ID", that was valid within the scope of a single document.
Give that the unique-id was just a join of Dataset_Document_NodeId
and not a globally unique value, such as a UUID
it caused more trouble than it was worth it, because it had to be kept in sync.
The attribute was, therefore, removed.
The dataset and document information has been moved to the root node as attributes
<Nodes dataset="MUSCIMA-pp_2.0" document="CVC-MUSCIMA_W-01_N-10_D-ideal">
<Node> ... </Node>
<Node> ... </Node>
</Nodes>
For compatibility reasons, the unique_id can be obtained by joining the information from the
root note with the ID field from each individual node with two underscores, e.g., MUSCIMA-pp_2.0__CVC-MUSCIMA_W-01_N-10_D-ideal__352 or simply call Node.unique_id.
The list of symbol classes used for MUSCIMA++ is provided in
the specifications/mff-muscima-classes-annot.xml file. See the
muscima.io module documentation for details on the Node classes file
format. (You do not have to worry about this unless you want to perform symbol
relationship validation.)
The allowed relationships are listed in the file specifications/mff-mucsima-classes-annot.deprules. See the muscima.grammar module documentation for the *.deprules file format details. (You do not have to worry about this unless you want to perform symbol relationship validation.)
In order to promote replicable comparison across experiments, we provide two suggested train/test splits: a "writer-independent" split, where the test set is selected so that no image by a test set writer appears in the training data (so that you test on unseen handwriting), and a "writer-dependent" split, which is the opposite: every writer in the test set also has (another) image in the training set.
Both of the test sets contain one instance of each page (so there are 20 test pages in each).
To get the indexes for a test set (in this case, writer-independent):
paste <(seq 140) <(ls data/Nodes/)
| grep -f specifications/testset-independent.txt
| cut -f 1
The MUSCIMA++ dataset is not perfect, as is always the case with extensive human-annotated datasets. In the interest of full disclosure and managing expectations, we list the known issues. We will do our best to deal with them in follow-up version of MUSCIMA++. If you find some errors that are not on this list and should be, especially problems that seem systematic, feel free to drop us a line at:
Of course, we will greatly appreciate any effort towards fixing these issues!
We hope that this dataset is going to eventually become an OMR community effort, with all the bells and whistles -- including co-authorship credit for future versions, esp. if you come up with bug-hunting and/or annotation automation.
The CVC-MUSCIMA dataset has had staff lines removed automatically with very high accuracy, based on a precise writing and scanning setup (using a standard notation paper and a specific pen across all 50 writers). However, there are still some errors in staff removal: sometimes, the staff removal algorithm took with it some pixels that were also legitimate part of a symbol. This manifests itself most frequently with stems.
Annotators also might have made mistakes that slipped both through automated validation and manual quality control. In automated validation, there is a tradeoff between catching errors and false alarms: music notation is complicated, and things like multiple stems per notehead happen even in the limited set of 20 pages of MUSCIMA++. In the same vein, although we did implement automated checks for bad inaccuracies, they only catch some of the problems as well, and our manual quality control procedure also relies on inherently imperfect human judgment.
Moral of the story: if your models are doing weird things, cross-validate, isolate the problematic data points, and drop us a line. We will try to maintain a list of "known offender" Nodes this way, so that other users will be able to benefit from your discoveries as well, and keep releasing corrected versions.
2019-06-07: The format of the MUSCIMA++ dataset has changed to achieve certain goals, including:
- better readability
- consistent naming conventions
- removal of unused classes that only clutter the code
- renaming of classes with special characters
- alignment of class-names with SMuFL as far as possible, See Issue #2 for more details.
- alignment of the dataset with the DeepScores dataset.
2017-08-17: Huge thanks to Alexander Pacha for a thorough look at all the symbols and providing the ERRATA file. I’ve fixed the errors he found. [JH]
The MUSCIMA++ dataset is licensed under the Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution NonCommercial Share-Alike license (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0). The full text of the license is in the LICENSE file that comes with the dataset.
The attribution requested for MUSCIMA++ is to cite the following ICDAR 2017 article [1]:
[1] Jan Hajič jr. and Pavel Pecina. The MUSCIMA++ Dataset for Handwritten Optical Music Recognition. 14th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR 2017. Kyoto, Japan, November 13-15, pp. 39-46, 2017.
And because MUSCIMA++ is a derivative work of CVC-MUSCIMA, we request that you follow the authors’ attribution rules for CVC-MUSCIMA as well, and cite article [2]:
[2] Alicia Fornés, Anjan Dutta, Albert Gordo, Josep Lladós. CVC-MUSCIMA: A Ground-truth of Handwritten Music Score Images for Writer Identification and Staff Removal. International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, Volume 15, Issue 3, pp 243-251, 2012. (DOI: 10.1007/s10032-011-0168-2).
Note (2018-01-05): The attribution [1] changed to a peer-reviewed article for MUSCIMA++, from the earlier arXiv.org submission:
[3] Jan Hajič jr., Pavel Pecina. In Search of a Dataset for Handwritten Optical Music Recognition: Introducing MUSCIMA++. CoRR, arXiv:1703.04824, 2017. https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04824.
If you wish to contact the authors of this dataset, write to:
[email protected] or [email protected]
We will be happy to hear your feedback!