So, the format for musicologist and researcher in music is the MEI format: https://music-encoding.org/ for which the reference engraver is verovio: https://www.verovio.org/index.xhtml Note that verovio is able to engrave in svg format while keeping a maximum of information from the original mei score, meaning that you can extract enough metadata to create an actual detection dataset for a deep learning model. This is my horrible hacked up script that will create a coco dataset from a set of scores engraved with verovio: https://github.com/kwon-young/music/blob/main/svg2pl.py I have published a synthetic music score dataset from this: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/kwonyoungchoi/trompa-coco/da... I anyone wants to try and fit a detector on top is welcome :)

To understand why OMR is so neglected is because most people widely underestimate the difficulty of the task. It has a specific blend of the most extreme shapes combined with an extremely complicated graphical grammar...

Thank you for this! Both MEI format and the Verovio engraver are news to me. I will check them out.

My first thought was whether MEI format is being added to MuseScore (the sheet music editor I use these days). It looks like it is: https://music-encoding.org/musescore-doc/

As a somewhat related aside, now that the MuseScore people own Hal Leonard and seem to pushing integration with their cloud subscription service, I wonder if they'll see some of these directions as potentially competing with them. I don't think there's anyone who wouldn't love a transposable clean digital version of their Real Books... and if Hal Leonard is in the business of selling Real Books, I can see where good OMR might be a problem for them. I guess piracy of scanned versions is already rampant, so maybe it's a wash.