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Thresholding (Grey to B&W) conversion

Last updated: 2023-11-28

If you scanned your music in Greyscale (as opposed to Color or Black&Whie), you did the right thing. Greyscale images will auto­mati­cally display the Thresholding dialog when opened in the Image Editor. Thresholding will allow you to "fine tune" light/dark balance and will improve originals that were faded or scanned with a lot of "Lightness".
 

Good to know …

We recommend that you always scan using SmartScore’s integrated scanning interface (FILE > Scan Music > Choose Interface = SmartScore’s). The optimum resolution will auto­mati­cally be selected, multiple pages will scan and be saved in greyscale. If you are importing a PDF music file into SmartScore, it will auto­mati­cally be converted to the .TIF file format ready to be recognized.

 
If pages were scanned with too much "Lightness" or if the original was faded significantly, adjusting the Thresholding tool towards "Dark" may help to "thicken up" the image which can improve recognition accuracy.

Take a look at the following animation:
 

Animation (0:44) - Threshold value for B/W conversion

Explained step by step (usual procedure) …

1
Open a image file in the image editor (*.tif, *.tiff, *.pdf, *.bmp). If this is a grayscale image (8‑bit), the Threshold dialog box is auto­mati­cally displayed. In addition, the B/W conversion button  in the image editor toolbar is active. This is not the case with black and white images (1‑bit).
2
You should always preview the new setting to visually check that there is a good balance between black and white regions. For multi-page documents, make sure that the Apply to all pages option is selected. Click OK to apply the new value.
 

Explained step by step (manual procedure) …

1
Open an image file (*.tif, *.tiff, *.pdf, *.bmp) into the image editor. If it is a grayscale image (8‑bit), the Threshold dialog box is automatically displayed. The B/W Conversion button  in the image editor toolbar is active.
2
Drag the light/dark slider within the dialog box to change the threshold.
3
After each threshold change, click on the Preview button and check the effects on the music image in the background (see also animation above). Make sure that no notation elements disappear from the image (too light) and that no additional graphic artifacts appear (too dark). In particular, all line elements (note lines, note stems) should be intact and not broken.
 
4
For multi-page documents, make sure that the Apply to all pages option is selected. When you've found what you think is the correct threshold, click OK.

Always follow basic rules …

The quality of the scan and the quality of the recognition are directly related. SmartScore is an optical music recognition (OMR = Optical Music Recognition ) system. Music recognition is merely the perceived representation of objects found in the scanned image file. Therefore, the better (more readable) the image file, the higher the recognition accuracy will be.

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Straightening crooked scans
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Overview: Image editingImage editorImage editor toolsStraightening pagesRotating pagesCropping pagesRetouching pagesImage information (dialog box)Tips for image editing
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