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.

This paper presents a quantitative comparison of different algorithms for the removal of stafflines from music images. It contains a survey of previously proposed algorithms and suggests a new skeletonization based approach. We define three different error metrics, compare the algorithms with respect to these metrics and measure their robustness with respect to certain image defects. Our test images are computer-generated scores on which we apply various image deformations typically found in real-world data. In addition to modern western music notation our test set also includes historic music notation such as mensural notation and lute tablature. Our general approach and evaluation methodology is not specific to staff removal, but applicable to other segmentation problems as well.