Camera tracking improvements?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

I have been playing with camera tracking for the first time today - and its pretty impressive.

I did however encounter problems with the tracking points and was wondering if there are any improvements in the pipeline for this function?

Aside from dabbling in 3d modelling - I am also an astronomer and do some astrophotography. Feature tracking within image sequences/movie files has been a staple within the amateur astronomy community for a number of years now - and is implemented in a number of freeware programs like Registax (http://www.astronomie.be/registax/). The feature tracking is quite advanced in such programs (I know some programs invoke things like fast fourier transform of the search/feature region) and can even handle low contrast features such as details on the moons surface or markings on the planet Jupiter.

I believe the developers of the camera tracking functions within blender may find it useful to look at how these programs implement feature tracking as there seems to be a lot of commonality in what Blender is trying to achieve vs what these programs can already do. The tracking features within these astro-imaging programs is quite mature - and there may be an opportunity to learn from them.

2

As an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer, I too have thought about the similarity between the camera tracker and software like Registax. Unfortunately, Registax is not an OSS so the code is not publicly available.

3

Perhaps not - but would its developers be against providing a few pointers ;o)…Also, even though the code itself isn’t available, information about some of the techniques they use (like the use of fft filters) probably is…for example http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDQQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jatit.org%2Fvolumes%2FVol48No1%2F2Vol48No1.pdf&ei=D-9tUdedCMnJ0QXdnoCIAQ&usg=AFQjCNH0RVdtU-Fpa0RFVQELSFgK6Q34sg&sig2=aW-L3HCnYIjLQU2YyABnOQ or http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/479975/Image-Tracking-and-Computer-Vision-Using-Fourier-I

4

FFT support has been looked at with libmv, but hasnt been fully integrated yet – https://code.google.com/p/libmv/source/browse/trunk/src/third_party/eigen/unsupported/Eigen/FFT?r=1157

usually developers dont look at other programs because of the potential to infringe on the IP of the program / a patent…

edit: just to clarify, libmv is the package blender uses on the back end to do the tracking.