Automatic cleaning and leveling pdf files with Neuratron

[w_m0zart]

Dear all,

I wrote a program which uses a Neuratron Photoscore feature to cleanup and level scans with sheetmusic. Although the program is not very fast, it produces from pdf files with raw scans, cropped manually, compact pdf files with only black and white colors.

The program saves me a lot of time. Although very good and promising alternatives exist like scan tailor, my program cooperates nicely with Neuratron Photoscore and will enable further editing of sheetmusic without any loss of quality and yet have very compact pdf files. (about 50 KB per page)

For the scanning and cropping pages I use Abbyy Finereader, saving files in a pdf format. Although Vuescan also works great. My current scanner is an Epson GT-30000 scanner with automatic sheetfeeder. The advantage is that it has a large A3 scanning size. My previous scanner was an Epson GT-10000+, which worked also quite fast (9 seconds per page), but the newer scanner is just a bit faster (5 seconds per page). Both scanners have a scsi connection, but with a simple Ratoc fr1sx scsi to firewire interface they work very good on windows, osx (with vuescan) and even on linux (xsane).

For scanning I choose greyscale at 300 dpi. The Neuratron processing works much better with greyscale than with black and white.

More information can be seen on this webpage: http://www.auditeon.com/software:musicpdf

Sourcecode can be found here: http://www.auditeon.com/software:musicpdf:dev

[Carolus]

Very interesting. You should consider posting some of your processed scans here, or even downloading something from the archive, processing it and uploading the cleaned up version. I gather that the processing makes Photoscore's music-OCR more viable. It might also be interesting to see a PDF generated from such a file to check what thje accuracy ratio is. Last I checked (about 2 years ago), neither SmartScore, Photoscore or SharpEye were very good at dealing with scans of hand-engraved music (basically anything produced before the 1980s).