Lighting Conditions
Lighting conditions describe how evenly and brightly the subject is illuminated — poor lighting is one of the top causes of low-quality video and degraded pose estimation.
Camera sensors need light to capture motion without blur or noise. Backlit subjects (standing in front of a window or bright sky) appear as silhouettes and make landmark detection unreliable. Dim indoor environments introduce noise that breaks tracking mid-swing. The ideal is consistent, even, natural light with the light source behind the camera rather than behind the athlete. SwingVantage flags backlit and low-light conditions automatically in the quality gate and explains the specific problem so it is easy to correct.
Example
Recording in front of a bright window produces a dark, underexposed subject that scores poorly on lighting — moving outdoors with the sun behind the camera fixes it.
Related terms
- Video Quality ScoreA Video Quality Score is a pre-analysis rating (0–100) that tells you how usable a submitted clip is before pose estimation begins — catching bad angles, motion blur, or poor lighting early.
- Camera Angle QualityCamera angle quality describes how well the recording position allows the system to see the relevant joints and movement plane — the single biggest controllable factor in analysis accuracy.
- Phone Video LimitationsPhone video limitations are the practical constraints of recording on a smartphone — lens distortion, stabilization artifacts, variable frame rate, and compressed color depth — that can reduce analysis accuracy relative to purpose-built cameras.
- Pose EstimationPose estimation is the computer-vision process that detects the positions of major body joints (keypoints) in each video frame, producing the skeleton that SwingVantage uses to measure angles and movement patterns.
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