That is why in recent years optical flow solutions based on motion vector estimation have become the favored solution for these kind of tracking scenarios.

While planar trackers like Mocha have always excelled at tracking rigid surfaces such as a billboard, license plate, and the ever-popular screen insert, tracking organic surfaces like skin, cloth or paper has always been a hit-and-miss scenario combined with a lot of manual, tedious labour. This mesh allows something which up until now has always been a weak point of planar tracking. Points can, of course, also be added manually to both kinds of meshes.

This mesh is either generated by Mocha automatically using areas where there is a lot of warping and/or contrast as points for the mesh or the mesh can be uniformly generated by the user. While that’s a mouthful, what it in essence means is that you can track a mesh of points inside a defined spline.

With Mocha Pro 2021, a new feature is introduced: PowerMesh sub-planar warp tracking. However, while its core planar tracker feature has been optimized in the last releases, the general principle on what kind of data is generated inside of Mocha has largely remain unchanged. Mocha is easily the leading planar tracking software available and the last several releases have seen improvements in regards to the utilization of the generated tracks, both in regards to applying the tracking data inside the app as well as exporting to various host applications.

Mocha pro mesh tracking