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.