The influence of acquisition environment on music score images captured by a camera has not yet been seriously examined. All existing Optical Music Recognition (OMR) systems attempt to recognize music score images captured by a scanner under ideal conditions. Therefore, when such systems process images under the influence of distortion, different viewpoints or suboptimal illumination effects, the performance, in terms of recognition accuracy and processing time, is unacceptable for deployment in practice. In this paper, a novel, lightweight but effective approach for dealing with the issues caused by camera based music scores is proposed. Based on the staff line information, musical rules, run length code, and projection, all regions of interest are determined. Templates created from inverse filter are then used to recognize the music symbols. Therefore, all fragmentation and deformation problems, as well as missed recognition, can be overcome using the developed method. The system was evaluated on a dataset consisting of real images captured by a smartphone. The achieved recognition rate and processing time were relatively competitive with state of the art works. In addition, the system was designed to be lightweight compared with the other approaches, which mostly adopted machine learning algorithms, to allow further deployment on portable devices with limited computing resources.