Detection Confidence & Lighting — Getting a Clean Skeleton Indoors

If your skeleton is jumping around at the indoor range, or disappearing for a frame or two, you're not alone — and it's almost certainly a lighting issue, not a bug. Here's what's happening and how to fix it.

What Detection Confidence Means

Detection confidence controls how sure MotionEdge needs to be that it can see you before it draws the skeleton. Think of it like a bouncer at a club — set it high and the app is picky ("I need to see you perfectly"), set it low and it's more relaxed ("close enough, come on in").

There are three settings, and they each do something slightly different:

• Detection Confidence — "How clearly does MotionEdge need to see you to start tracking?" This kicks in when the app first finds you in the frame, or when it loses you and needs to re-detect.

• Tracking Confidence — "How much can MotionEdge trust its tracking between frames?" Once the app has found you, this controls how aggressively it keeps following you frame-to-frame vs. starting over with a fresh detection.

• Presence Confidence — "How sure is MotionEdge that you're still in frame?" If this drops below the threshold, the app assumes you've left the frame and stops drawing.

The default for all three is 0.50 (50%), which works great in most environments — especially outdoors.

Where to Find the Setting

1. Open any swing in Video Review
2. Tap the gear icon (⚙️) in the toolbar
3. In the Pose Settings sheet, scroll down to the "Pose Engine Configuration" section
4. You'll see three sliders: Detection Confidence, Tracking Confidence, and Presence Confidence
5. Adjust, then tap "Apply Configuration" to activate your changes

Why Indoor Lighting Can Cause Problems

Here's the thing about LED lights — they're not actually "on" all the time. They flicker on and off incredibly fast (it's called PWM, or pulse-width modulation). You can't see it with your eyes, but your iPhone's camera absolutely can.

What happens is the camera captures rolling dark bands across the image — areas where the LED was "off" during that slice of the exposure. To MotionEdge, those dark bands look like part of you has disappeared. The skeleton tracking gets confused: "Wait, I could see your shoulders a moment ago, now there's a dark stripe across them."

The result? The skeleton "jitters" — it jumps position, or drops out for a frame, then snaps back. It's especially common in:

• Indoor driving ranges — rows of high-power LED fixtures
• Simulator bays — projector light mixed with overhead LEDs
• Home garages — older fluorescent tubes combined with LED shop lights

This isn't a MotionEdge bug. It's physics — your camera's electronic shutter interacts with the light's flicker frequency. The good news is you can compensate for it.

Recommended Settings by Environment

Start with the row that matches your environment. If the skeleton is still jittery, nudge detection confidence down by 0.05 and tracking confidence up by 0.05 until it stabilizes.

The Counterintuitive Part

This trips people up: you're moving the sliders in opposite directions. Here's why that makes sense:

• Lower detection confidence = more permissive. You're telling the app "keep tracking even if the image is a bit dark or noisy." This helps it find you through the flicker.

• Higher tracking confidence = stricter. You're telling the app "if your frame-to-frame tracking looks off, throw it out and re-detect from scratch instead of guessing." This prevents the skeleton from drifting to a weird position and staying there.

In short: be generous about finding the golfer, but strict about maintaining accuracy. The app re-detects fast enough that a fresh start is better than a bad guess.

Pro Tip: Camera Shutter Speed

The most effective fix isn't in MotionEdge at all — it's in your camera settings.

LED flicker happens because the camera's shutter speed doesn't align with the light's flicker rate. If you can lock your shutter speed to 1/120s or 1/60s, the exposure will span a complete flicker cycle and the banding disappears entirely.

How to do it:

• iPhone Camera app: Go to Settings → Camera → Record Video → turn on "Lock Exposure" if available. The stock app has limited manual control.
• Third-party camera apps like Filmic Pro or ProCamera give you direct shutter speed control — set it to 1/120s for 60 Hz LED lighting (most of North America) or 1/100s for 50 Hz (Europe, Asia).

This eliminates the problem at the source — no confidence tuning needed. But if you're using MotionEdge's built-in capture and can't control shutter speed, the confidence settings above are your best tool.

Still Having Issues?

If you've tried the settings above and the skeleton is still misbehaving:

1. Check your distance from camera. MotionEdge works best when your full body fills about 60-80% of the frame. Too far away and detection struggles regardless of lighting.
2. Avoid backlit setups. If there's a bright window or light source directly behind you, the camera exposes for the bright background and you become a silhouette.
3. Wear contrasting colors. A dark shirt against a dark background makes it harder for the app to distinguish your joints. Lighter colors or patterns help.
4. Try a different angle. Sometimes shifting the camera a foot to the left or right avoids the worst of the LED banding pattern.

Have a question we haven't covered? Let us know — we're building this knowledge base based on what golfers actually ask about.