Antti Kaihola wrote:
>On Sat, 06 Jan 2001, John Chambers wrote:
>
>> So how does one go about identifying which of the graphics files
>> and/or PDF/PS files contain music?
>
>> It seems to me that discovering that these contain music is far from
>> trivial. For the gif and png files, it's probably not possible with
>> the current state of AI.
>
>I've tried some OMR (optical music recognition) programs, and although
>their performance is still poor compared to OCR, I've been quite
>impressed of what they can do.
>
>Imagine we have an OMR package. It can recognize without help from the
>user say 25 % of all musical symbols on an image of a music sheet. On
>the other hand, given any non-musical image it does not misinterpret
>more than half of that amount as music. If such programs do exist, I'd
>say that we have an AI algorithm strong enough for a visual music search
>engine.
>
>We could try and see. There are free versions and trial versions of OMR
>software available out there.
>
For some time I've been idly contemplating writing an OMR program which
would produca first draft abc from picture files. The first task
such a program would have to perform is to locate the staves. Now
a pattern of five equidistant horizontal lines is very distinctive,
and it's not hard to devise an algorithm that will detect it, even
if the lines are a few degrees off from the horizontal, as is likely
to be the case in many scans.
If all you want to do is decide whether a picture file contains music
you can probably make that decision with a high degree of accuracy
based on the presence or absence of staves.
Phil Taylor
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