Visual Methods for the Retrieval of Guitarist Fingering

This article presents a method to visually detect and recognize fingering gestures of the left hand of a guitarist. This method has been developed following preliminary manual and automated analysis of video recordings. These first analyses led to some important findings about the design methodology of a vision system for guitarist fingering, namely the focus on the effective gesture, the consideration of the action of each individual finger, and a recognition system not relying on comparison against a knowledge base of previously learned fingering positions. Motivated by these results, studies on three aspects of a complete fingering system were conducted: the first on finger tracking; the second on strings and frets detection; and the last one on movement segmentation. Finally, these concepts were integrated into a prototype and a system for left hand fingering detection