This paper addresses the task of score following in sheet music given as unprocessed images. While existing work either relies on OMR software to obtain a computer-readable score representation, or crucially relies on prepared sheet image excerpts, we propose the first system that directly performs score following in full-page, completely unprocessed sheet images. Based on incoming audio and a given image of the score, our system directly predicts the most likely position within the page that matches the audio, outperforming current state-of-the-art image-based score followers in terms of alignment precision. We also compare our method to an OMR-based approach and empirically show that it can be a viable alternative to such a system.

The goal of score following is to track a musical performance, usually in the form of audio, in a corresponding score representation. Established methods mainly rely on computer-readable scores in the form of MIDI or MusicXML and achieve robust and reliable tracking results. Recently, multimodal deep learning methods have been used to follow along musical performances in raw sheet images. Among the current limits of these systems is that they require a non trivial amount of preprocessing steps that unravel the raw sheet image into a single long system of staves. The current work is an attempt at removing this particular limitation. We propose an architecture capable of estimating matching score positions directly within entire unprocessed sheet images. We argue that this is a necessary first step towards a fully integrated score following system that does not rely on any preprocessing steps such as optical music recognition.