rotoCap Progress (Updated)

The past weekend has yielded many successes. After finally fixing a bug that wouldn't advance the frame properly I've fully re-engineered the core tracking engine and even ran some benchmark tests which will be posted shortly (updated, see below). The movie above shows the raw output, single pass with "Simplify Curves" command in from the Graph Editor, and a final hand-tweaked version. The raw output creates lots of key frames that aren't all necessary so by keeping the important key frames, this makes it much easier for the final manual cleanup due to the reduced key set.

Test Results & Observations
Environment

• 50 JPG image sequence
• 1 Drone sampled (Pink)
• timerX MEL function for timing

Parameters

• Tolerance: (0.0 to 1.0) range of RGB value rotoCap accepts as close enough to desired color.
• Step: (0.0 to 1.0) distance to next sampled UV coordinate
• # of Keys: how many keyframes rotoCap created for a drone
• Time Elapsed: (seconds) starts when "Launch Drones" is pressed, ends after last drone is tested

Test 1: Initial Test

• Tolerance .2
• Step .05
• # of Keys 7
• Time Elapsed = 101.47

Observations:

Almost all of the keys occurred at the beginning while the target color was stationary. Tracking was not detecting motion over time. I suspected the step size was too large and rotoCap just couldn't sample enough UV's to find the drone.

Test 2: Smaller Step Size/Centering Off

• Tolerance .2
• Step .025
• # of Keys 16
• Time Elapsed = 1217.69

Observations:

Reducing the step turned out to fix the sparse key issue. rotoCap still seemed to favor the edge of the color mass instead of centered which makes sense since this was run with self-centering turned off.

Test 3: Centering On

• Tolerance .2
• Step .025
• # of Keys 35 (simplified: 17)
• Time Elapsed = 71.86

Observations:
The time difference is substantial due to the centering sub-process passing the centered UV coordinates to the next cycle of the colorSeek process. The key generation also went up significantly. Running a simplify curves on the XY curves in the Graph Editor essentially deletes the unnecessary stationary keyframes. I'm very happy how well the script is working now.