libmv. Since both KLT and Hybrid rely on ESM underneath, KLT and Hybrid now
have a minimum correlation setting to match. With this fix, track failures
should get detected quicker, with the issue that sometimes the tracker will
give up too easily. That is fixable by reducing the required correlation (in
the track properties).
add it as an option (under "Hybrid") in the tracking settings. The
region tracker is a combination of brute force tracking for coarse
alignment, then refinement with the ESM/KLT algorithm already in
libmv that gives excellent subpixel precision (typically 1/50'th
of a pixel)
This also adds a new "brute force" region tracker which does a
brute force search through every pixel position in the destination
for the pattern in the first frame. It leverages SSE if available,
similar to the SAD tracker, to do this quickly. Currently it does
some unnecessary conversions to/from floating point that will get
fixed later.
The hybrid tracker glues the two trackers (brute & ESM) together
to get an overall better tracker. The algorithm is simple:
1. Track from frame 1 to frame 2 with the brute force tracker.
This tries every possible pixel position for the pattern from
frame 1 in frame 2. The position with the smallest
sum-of-absolute-differences is chosen. By definition, this
position is only accurate up to 1 pixel or so.
2. Using the result from 1, initialize a track with ESM. This does
a least-squares fit with subpixel precision.
3. If the ESM shift was more than 2 pixels, report failure.
4. If the ESM track shifted less than 2 pixels, then the track is
good and we're done. The rationale here is that if the
refinement stage shifts more than 1 pixel, then the brute force
result likely found some random position that's not a good fit.
In some cases solving can take a while (especially when refining is used)
and keeping interface locked is a bit annoying. Now camera solver is moved
to job system and interface isn't locking.
Reporting progress isn't really accurate, but trying to make it more linear
can lead to spending more effort on it than having benefit. Also, changing
status in the information line helps to understand that blender isn't hang
up and solving is till working nicely.
Main changes in code:
- libmv_solveReconstruction now accepts additional parameters:
* progress_update_callback - a function which is getting called
from solver algorithm to report progress back to Blender.
* callback_customdata - a user-defined context which is passing
to progress_update_callback so progress can be updated in needed
blender-side data structures.
This parameters are optional.
- Added structure MovieTrackingStats which is placed in MovieTracking
structure. It's supposed to be used for displaying information about
different operations (currently it's only camera solver, but can be
easily used for something else in the future) in clip editor.
This statistics structure is getting allocated for time operator is
working and not saving into .blend file.
- Clip Editor now displays statistics stored in MovieTrackingStats structure
like it's done for rendering.
- Add support for refining the camera's intrinsic parameters
during a solve. Currently, refining supports only the following
combinations of intrinsic parameters:
f
f, cx, cy
f, cx, cy, k1, k2
f, k1
f, k1, k2
This is not the same as autocalibration, since the user must
still make a reasonable initial guess about the focal length and
other parameters, whereas true autocalibration would eliminate
the need for the user specify intrinsic parameters at all.
However, the solver works well with only rough guesses for the
focal length, so perhaps full autocalibation is not that
important.
Adding support for the last two combinations, (f, k1) and (f,
k1, k2) required changes to the library libmv depends on for
bundle adjustment, SSBA. These changes should get ported
upstream not just to libmv but to SSBA as well.
- Improved the region of convergence for bundle adjustment by
increasing the number of Levenberg-Marquardt iterations from 50
to 500. This way, the solver is able to crawl out of the bad
local minima it gets stuck in when changing from, for example,
bundling k1 and k2 to just k1 and resetting k2 to 0.
- Add several new region tracker implementations. A region tracker
is a libmv concept, which refers to tracking a template image
pattern through frames. The impact to end users is that tracking
should "just work better". I am reserving a more detailed
writeup, and maybe a paper, for later.
- Other libmv tweaks, such as detecting that a tracker is headed
outside of the image bounds.
This includes several changes made directly to the libmv extern
code rather expecting to get those changes through normal libmv
channels, because I, the libmv BDFL, decided it was faster to work
on libmv directly in Blender, then later reverse-port the libmv
changes from Blender back into libmv trunk. The interesting part
is that I added a full Levenberg-Marquardt loop to the region
tracking code, which should lead to a more stable solutions. I
also added a hacky implementation of "Efficient Second-Order
Minimization" for tracking, which works nicely. A more detailed
quantitative evaluation will follow.
Original patch by Keir, cleaned a bit by myself.
===========================
Commiting camera tracking integration gsoc project into trunk.
This commit includes:
- Bundled version of libmv library (with some changes against official repo,
re-sync with libmv repo a bit later)
- New datatype ID called MovieClip which is optimized to work with movie
clips (both of movie files and image sequences) and doing camera/motion
tracking operations.
- New editor called Clip Editor which is currently used for motion/tracking
stuff only, but which can be easily extended to work with masks too.
This editor supports:
* Loading movie files/image sequences
* Build proxies with different size for loaded movie clip, also supports
building undistorted proxies to increase speed of playback in
undistorted mode.
* Manual lens distortion mode calibration using grid and grease pencil
* Supervised 2D tracking using two different algorithms KLT and SAD.
* Basic algorithm for feature detection
* Camera motion solving. scene orientation
- New constraints to "link" scene objects with solved motions from clip:
* Follow Track (make object follow 2D motion of track with given name
or parent object to reconstructed 3D position of track)
* Camera Solver to make camera moving in the same way as reconstructed camera
This commit NOT includes changes from tomato branch:
- New nodes (they'll be commited as separated patch)
- Automatic image offset guessing for image input node and image editor
(need to do more tests and gather more feedback)
- Code cleanup in libmv-capi. It's not so critical cleanup, just increasing
readability and understanadability of code. Better to make this chaneg when
Keir will finish his current patch.
More details about this project can be found on this page:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Nazg-gul/GSoC-2011
Further development of small features would be done in trunk, bigger/experimental
features would first be implemented in tomato branch.
