Why is Voodoo Tracking Messing Up?

[TigerGuy]

The title and description pretty much sum up the problem. It seems that after using Voodoo and Icam, only so much tracking is captured for A:M. After a second of decent tracking, the camera starts to skip around and/or get stuck on some random angle.

 

Is it the lighting? Is it too much camera movement? Did I make the video too long? I hope I can find out.

[Luuk Steitner]

There are many reasons the captured data could get incorrect. How do the tracked points in Voodoo look when you scroll through the video? are they really sticking to the same points on objects? I've noticed sometimes it can be very hard to get good tracking results even when all objects seem easy to track with the eye. Things like compression or interlacing (or wrong setting) can make it unreliable. Are you able to get good results with other videos? It takes some experience to learn why a video is hard to track.

If you're sure the video is tracked correctly you may post the video, voodoo file and A:M prj file exported by Icam here or post a link. Then I can take a look to see what the problem is.

[TigerGuy]

There are many reasons the captured data could get incorrect. How do the tracked points in Voodoo look when you scroll through the video? are they really sticking to the same points on objects? I've noticed sometimes it can be very hard to get good tracking results even when all objects seem easy to track with the eye. Things like compression or interlacing (or wrong setting) can make it unreliable. Are you able to get good results with other videos? It takes some experience to learn why a video is hard to track.

If you're sure the video is tracked correctly you may post the video, voodoo file and A:M prj file exported by Icam here or post a link. Then I can take a look to see what the problem is.

Here's the project. The Voodoo file wouldn't upload, and the video file never finished uploading (hopefully not because of the other processes going on).

CatTalkProject.prj

[Luuk Steitner]

From the A:M project file I can not see what causes the problem. Can you upload the Voodoo file if you zip it?

[TigerGuy]

From the A:M project file I can not see what causes the problem. Can you upload the Voodoo file if you zip it?

I'm afraid I don't know how to zip things.

[Luuk Steitner]

You'll need a program like Winzip to zip files. 7-Zip is free.

[TigerGuy]

You'll need a program like Winzip to zip files. 7-Zip is free.

Wait, I have a guess about what's happening. Tell me if I'm wrong:

 

There are a couple conditions for camera tracking. One, the scenery has to have enough lighting to fully track. Two, there has to be a fair amount of stiff objects sitting around, at least enough to cover sufficient dots with (I may have been mistaken when I assumed that the software could track my cats movements).

 

If I experiment with these ideas, and if everything turns out all right, you may not need to look at the footage and data or whatever else. Thanks for the discussion.

[Luuk Steitner]

Yes, you will need enough solid objects in your scene. Those object should have a good contrast with their surrounding / have hard egdes / patterns etc. The edges of objects or colors make up the points that are tracked. Also sudden fast movements can mess up the tracking. I tried to track a video once in Voodoo and Icarus but both couldn't handle it. First I didn't understand why because there were a lot of good solid points that could be tracked but it turned out the problem was the colors of these objects where to close to each other.

I think only playing with many videos can make you learn what those applications can track and what not.