Staff line features as information carrier

For watermarking music scores different information carriers have been proposed. Dependent on the used information carrier the proposed methods have different strengths. The methods proposed so far have advantages either in robustness or in capacity. Thus, the potential user of watermarking techniques has to decide which watermarking scheme fits his needs best. Although changing the features of the musical symbols for embedding a watermark is highly robust, the capacity is limited by the number of musical symbols which are present in the music score which should be watermarked. The method we propose uses the staff lines for embedding information. Its advantage is its independence of the number of musical symbols. Even an empty music score can be watermarked. To increase robustness in comparison to other existing approaches we do not change the thickness of the staff lines. The staff line properties straightness and vertical distances are used for embedding information. Because we are using scanned images as source files, two major parts in the implementation can be identified: staff line detection and geometrical transformation of the image which are described in this article.