C-MIDI, ho!

In a rather exciting development, I just received the source code from Dimitry Gorodnichy for the C-MIDI project. This might give us a head start on our automatic data collection system.

Here is the conference paper that describes the marker-less C-MIDI system:

D. Gorodnichy and A. Yogeswaran, “Detection and tracking of pianist hands and fingers,” in Proceedings of the Third Canadian Conference on Computer and Robot Vision, 2006.

The paper is long on technical details, but short on performance data. This is all they have to say on the subject of system performance:

The professional pianists, as they play and see at the same time on a computer screen the visual annotation of their playing, are content acknowledging the correct finger annotation in about a half of cases. Of the other half, the fingers are either left unmarked or can provide a set of possibilities to choose from.​

​Still, it is worth a long hard look.

I have checked the C-MIDI source code into our new GitHub repo. (I think it is good to keep this project separate from the other Didactyl code in case this one gets a little bloated, which seems likely.)

Unfortunately, the code provided is a Microsoft Visual Studio (Windows) project, which I have little experience with. But we do have a free Visual Studio license through UIC, so we should be able to compile the code easily on a Windows box.

Pablo and I are looking into running Windows on our Macs using VirtualBox. I have had luck doing this in the past, and we have free Windows Server 2012 R2 licenses through UIC, so this can be done at no cost.

Another option, and a better one if we actually want to test this system, is to run Windows under Boot Camp.