Tracking the guitarist’s fingers as well as recognizing pressed chords from a video sequence

Towards the actualization of an autonomous guitar teaching system, this paper proposes the following two video analysis based methods: (1) pressed chord recognition and (2) fingertip tracking. For (1), an algorithm that can extract finger contours and chord changes is proposed so that the chords pressed by the guitar player are recognized. For (2), an algorithm that can track the fingertips by continuously monitoring the appearance and disappearance of the regions of fingertip candidates is proposed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed two modules are robust enough under complex contexts such as complicated background and different illumination conditions. Promising results were obtained for accurate tracking of fingertips and for accurate recognition of pressed chords.