[MEI-L] Tools/libraries to find staves in scanned sheet music

[Urs Liska]

Dear MEI,

I am investigating ways to produce empty staves/barlines to overlay
over scanned sheet music. The use case is creating teaching/testing
sheets for music theory and aural training classes (so the target
repertoire would be mostly common western notation).

My first approach was to create a Scribus script that draws staff- and
barlines from rectangles that have been drawn over the systems. While
this works surprisingly well it is still a tedious work for longer and
full scores.

AFAIK the detection of staff- and barlines is basically a solved
challenge in OMR. Could somebody point me towards the potentially
easiest approach I should explore? Algorithms, libraries, ready-to-use
tools?

What I need is something that analyses (multipage) sheet music from
image or PDF files and produces a structured text file with all the
relevant coordinates, or anything from which I can instruct some tool
(whether Inkscape, Scribus, LilyPond or whatever) to generate the empty
sheet music to overlay over the scanned score.

Thank you for any pointers
Urs

PS: Do you agree with me that trying to somehow *remove* the musical
content from a scanned image is a much less promising approach?