Psaltiki Toolkit for Gamera
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Byzantine chant notation
Byzantine music uses a neume based notation system. The sacred music of this
repertory is more commonly known as Psaltiki. The notation
system has gone through many stages, the most recent one having been
developed in the early 1800s in Constantinople.
Here is a typical
example of this notation (from Heirmologion by Petros of
Peloponnesos, transcribed by Chourmouzios the Chartophylax,
Constantinople,1825):
The aim of this project is to build a system that reads such an image
and converts it into a machine readable code.
What is this toolkit?
The aim of the Psaltiki Toolkit is to help building Psaltiki recognition
systems. It provides ready to use recognition scripts for training neume
symbols and the actual recognition based on the trained data.
It is based on and requires the
Gamera
document image analysis framework.
Documentation and references
The user's manual is included in the software distribution in the
subdirectory docs/html.
If you are using the Windows binary installer, which does not include
the documentation, you can browse the docs online
or download it in HTML format from here:
A detailed description of the algorithms used in the system and
extensive experimental results on a variety of printed books can
be found in the publication
- C. Dalitz, G.K. Michalakis, C. Pranzas:
Optical Recognition of Psaltic Byzantine Chant Notation.
International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition,
vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 143-158, December 2008
A self-archived version of the above paper is available from
C. Dalitz' publications list.
Authors
Software
The source code of our software is available under the terms of the GNU
General Public License. Moreover we provide binary installers for
Windows 2000/XP for convenience.
Source Code
You can get a development snapshot of the source code via CVS access from the
Psaltiki SourceForge site.
In short, you obtain the source code with the following two commands:
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@psaltiki4gamera.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/psaltiki4gamera login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@psaltiki4gamera.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/psaltiki4gamera co -P psaltiki4gamera
When asked for a password by the first command (login), just press
ENTER. Note that the login command does not perform a login and
start a session. It will instead store login information somewhere in your
home directory and return immediately. Future checkouts will then no longer
require the login command.
Note that compiling the source requires a working
installation of a sufficiently recent Gamera CVS version.
If downloading the source code via cvs causes trouble, you can download
file releases of the source code from here (html docs included):
Windows Binary Installer
The Windows installer requires the following software in exactly the given
versions installed:
The following installers for the psaltiki toolkit are availble
(see the documentation how to use the
software and the Changelog for revision history):