German Lute Tablature Recognition

This paper describes a document recognition system for 16th century German staffless lute tablature notation. We present methods for page layout analysis, symbol recognition and symbol layout analysis and report error rates for these methods on a variety of historic prints. Page layout analysis is based on horizontal separator lines, which may interfere with other symbols. The proposed algorithm for their detection and removal is also applicable to other single staff line detection problems (like percussion notation), for which common staff line removal algorithms fail.