Skeleton Overlay
Also known as: pose overlay, keypoint visualization
A skeleton overlay draws your detected body joints, and the lines connecting them, over your video. It shows exactly what the system tracked.
SwingVantage draws the detected skeleton on top of the video frame by frame. This makes the pose estimation output (where the system placed your joints) visible rather than invisible. It serves two purposes. First, it lets you check that tracking was accurate before trusting the numbers. If the hip joint jumps around, something went wrong. Second, it lets you watch your own movement in a stylized form that is easier to analyze than raw video. In the Motion Lab 3D view, the skeleton is projected onto a three-dimensional avatar for more intuitive analysis.
After upload, scrub through the overlay at the key moments of your swing — address, top, and impact. If the hip or shoulder joint looks displaced, the analysis numbers for those positions will be less reliable.
Use the skeleton overlay to identify which joints tracked cleanly and focus your analysis on metrics derived from those joints. Dismiss metrics from joints that visibly drifted, regardless of their stated confidence level.
Example
After upload, the skeleton overlay shows a hip landmark drifting off the body at the top of the backswing — a sign of tracking loss, not a real movement.
How it shows up on video
The skeleton overlay renders as colored dots at each joint and lines connecting adjacent joints, drawn over the video frame. Well-tracked joints appear stable and follow body movement smoothly; poorly tracked joints wobble or teleport.
Common mistakes
- Ignoring the overlay and trusting the numbers directly — the overlay is your ground-truth check on whether tracking worked.
- Confusing the overlay with the analysis finding — the overlay shows what was detected, not whether it is correct biomechanics.
- Not noticing landmark drift at the start of the downswing, which is the most common tracking failure point.
- Assuming a clean overlay on one frame means all frames tracked well — check the full timeline, not just the impact frame.
In SwingVantage Motion Lab
In Motion Lab, the skeleton overlay is dual-purpose: it appears on the original video for verification, and it drives the 3D avatar. You can hide or show it independently of the avatar for cleaner viewing.
Related terms
- Pose EstimationPose estimation is the computer-vision process that detects the positions of major body joints (keypoints) in each video frame. This produces the skeleton that SwingVantage uses to measure angles and movement patterns.
- Landmark TrackingLandmark tracking follows the position of each detected body keypoint across consecutive video frames. This creates a time-series trajectory for every joint that enables timing and velocity measurements.
- Motion LabMotion Lab is SwingVantage's in-browser 3D motion analysis tool. It turns your video into a 3D avatar and timeline you can rotate, scrub, and measure.
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