FreeTrack Forum

Hi, I set uo battery plus a led (just for testing)
I fiddled the quickcam controls to make the image pitch black, except for the led light (a white dot on the screen).
Them, I run freetrack and all I can see is a black screen, nothing else...

anyone can help ?

Ricardo

HI, made it work....

What I've found so far:

Could make it work without removing the IR filter, and using a white led (non-IR).... My fps was 20. With fluorescent lights on...

Whats the advantage of removing the IR filter?

and how can I get 30 FPS?

Im using an quickcan express, very old one...

thank you!

Hello rbuchner

Freetrack works using a dot tracking algorithm.
That means you must provide Freetrack a image containing ONLY the dots to track.

This is acheived by providing a high contrast image to the program.

Your dots must be MUCH BRIGHTER than the background, so you can adjust your settings to filter out all background and only track the dots.
If your dots aren't bright enough and blend into the background, you wont get a proper tracking.

You can use bright leds, and setup your webcam to only see those leds.
But this often leads to unwanted reflections on the screen.

By removing the IR filter , we greatly increase the webcam sensitivity to IR range light.

We can then use bright IR leds to get the desired contrast between the dots and the background. Since they're IR, screen reflections isn't an issue anymore.

We can further increase the constrast by adding a VL filter to the cam, to lower the cam sensitivity to "normal" light.

So IR mod your webcam if you think you have to do it to get a proper tracking.

If your tracking works fine with an unmodded webcam and :
- normal leds and an acceptable reflection,
or
- ir leds

Then don't mod your webcam (no need to do unnecessary actions , isn't it ?)



To get 30 FPS :
It's webcam and driver dependant, but basically , you need to turn off all the webcam driver eye candy (auto exposure, auto antiflicker, auto whatsoever....) to put your webcam in fully manual mode.

Then tweak your webcam setting to get as much fps as possible since still viewing your dots.

I'm not the FPS master here, but i'm sure somebody will drop and info soon in your thread  



cya.

The original poster mentions he's fiddled with the quickcam controls; I wonder if he is running any of the nasty bloatware that comes with these cams? I know for best performance with my MS cam, I have to close a number of eye candy programs like the things that add special effects and such like.
Closing MSN or stopping it accessing the cam is useful for me too.
Basically, you want the driver for your cam installed and nothing else; none of the other rubbish software that the installer will want to drop onto your PC.