Staff Line Detection by Skewed Projection

Abstract

Most optical music recognition systems start image analysis by the detection of staff lines. This work explores simple techniques from document image analysis, such as line segment extraction, to guide the staff line identification process. Specifically, the overall document skew is computed from the detected line segments. Staff lines are then projected in the direction of the detected skew and identified as maxima in the histogram of projections. The method is simple to code and robust even for unrealistically large rotations of the input data.