Publishing automation – finding symbols in music notation

Finding symbols in music notation like barlines, Clefs, key signatures, accidentals in a music notation image is not easy.  Even finding the systems reliably is harder than you might think, and from the point of view of a computer an awful lot of features in a picture could be barlines.

Yet even though this functionality – the ability to find every music notation symbol on a page – is important for many automation tasks in the music publishing industry, it has just not been available until now.  But now, for the first time a cross-platform library to do all of this and more is available.  Its called ReadScoreLib from Dolphin Computing and it does all of this and a lot more besides.  In fact ReadScoreLib will even play your printed music from a photo – even a distorted photo from a device camera.  ReadScoreLib takes an image or a list of images and performs full Music OCR (OMR).  From the results it outputs not only a MusicXML file of the music, but also a list of every symbol, along with its bounding box in the original coordinates of the input page.  ReadScoreLib will do other things too.  For example it will reverse photographic or scanning distortions and give you back a clean image, thresholded adaptively and accommodating for light and shade.  ReadScoreLib is super fast, super accurate and available for all the common platforms.