Levels shipped at 0–255 unless someone moved the sliders, and Bicycle
Race showed what that costs. Its ink is grey, not black — a scanned
engraving, ink at 2–95, paper at 163–255 — and with alpha = 255 − luminance
that greyness becomes transparency. No pixel in the exported bundle was
even fully opaque, and the downscale to the song's width blended every
stroke edge further. Nothing downstream can rescue it.
So detection proposes levels too, like it proposes cuts and skew.
Notation is two-tone, which makes Otsu's split the measurement wanted;
the points sit halfway from it to each end of the range, so the ramp
between them survives as antialiasing rather than going jagged. A page
already scanned bilevel has no interior split — Otsu degenerates to 0 —
and is left alone. Per page, with the median becoming the song's, so a
near-blank page cannot set them.
Esa Kataja
19f28f4da8