Re: Scanning music OCR to lilypond?

[David Raleigh Arnold]

On Sunday 01 June 2003 07:29 pm, Graham Percival wrote:
> On Fri, 30 May 2003 10:01:43 -0400
>
> Daniel Ashton <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Is anyone aware of a way to scan music into lilypond format?
>
> I very much doubt it.  The best way I can think (in the near future)
> would be to use a commercial windows program (possibly under Wine) to
> scan the music, then export that sheet music to midi, then use
> midi2ly to get lilypond notation.
>
> In the longer term, you could get involved in some of the open-source
> OCR projects and start applying them to sheet music.  Clara OCR is
> one such project (a brief glance at the FAQ shows that they "train"
> their program by using feedback from many users; I don't know if
> other OCR projects do that too).

It seems that there are different approaches to ocr.  They put the
letters in boxes and then see how they are drawn or compare them
to a huge database.  Some of them make their database like Clara
by teaching the letters to the program, some are more logic
driven like jocr-gocr.

Putting things in boxes is certainly doable, but it is a very different
proposition with music.

Soon, hopefully, it will occur to someone at Clara or Jocr to
apply Eli Abir's proposition that understanding a concept is
nothing more than seeing it from more than one perspective.
Like finding a pearl in a dungheap, your chances are much greater
if you are looking for something round *and* small *and* white.

> http://www.claraocr.org/   (that site also contains links to other
> Linux OCR projects)
>
> If you want to start such a project, I recommend that you try to
> create an "OCR to MusicXML" project (rather than one focused on
> Lilypond code), since then you have a better chance of involving
> people from other Linux music programs.  But in my completely
> unfounded armchair estimation, such a project would be nowhere near
> usable for at least a year.

Yes.
>
> OTOH, that's true of _every_ project, and once it's done, it'd be a
> huge boost for Mutopia and related sites.  Don't let me discourage
> you from such a task!

Me neither.  I wish you success!  DaveA

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