Retrieval of guitarist fingering information using computer vision

Writing musical notation for guitar, otherwise known as tablature (or colloquially, “tab”) can be a tedious and time-consuming task when performed by hand. Software exists that can detect the pitch of a signal emitted from a musical instrument, but this is insufficient for guitar tablature which also requires spatial information. Previous vision-based methods had low accuracy rates and required the camera to be fixed to the guitar neck. In this paper we propose an algorithm that uses a markerless approach to successfully locate a guitar fretboard in a webcam image, normalise it and detect the individual locations of the guitarist´s fretting fingers. Preliminary testing of this system shows that it is more accurate at note recognition than existing methods which require a camera mounted on the guitar neck.