The band filled the mouth because a band is the wrong reduction: the bright
region is a blob, and reading it as "everything above a line" throws the shape
away.
Extracting a contour reintroduces the vertex-correspondence problem that made
me avoid it, but for a blob there is a way out. Radial sampling from the
centroid along N fixed directions makes vertex k always mean "the extent in
direction k": correspondence holds by construction, the count is fixed, and
temporal smoothing cannot reorder anything. It also yields a star-shaped
reduction, which suits flat colour.
Tongue rejection, which the band had no way to express:
- pixels red relative to their own brightness are dropped (teeth are neutral)
- component choice is biased toward the top of the cavity, since area alone
picks the tongue when the mouth is wide
- separate inner and outer controls: cavity erode pulls the sampled region off
the lip edge, blob grow/erode resizes the found blob
Also: a knob wired in app.js but missing from index.html threw during wiring
and left a blank page with nothing useful in the console - which is exactly
what happened to teethDwell in the previous commit. el() now names the missing
id, and window.onerror surfaces it in the status line.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three causes, all of them mine:
Otsu always returns a split, including on a homogeneous region - given a dark
cavity with no teeth it invents a threshold and calls half the pixels bright.
The gate is now the separation between the two class means, which is the only
thing that says whether the split means anything. Coverage was the wrong
signal: it is high both when the mouth is full of teeth and when the region is
uniformly dark and Otsu has split noise.
The row scan tracked the last qualifying row anywhere rather than where the run
from the top stops, so one bright row near the bottom - a lit lower lip inside
the ring - pushed the line to full height. It now breaks at the first failing
row once the run has started.
MediaPipe's inner lip landmarks sit slightly outside the real opening, so the
sampled region included lip pixels, which are bright and sit exactly at the
boundary where they do most damage. The ring is now eroded toward its centroid
before sampling, with the amount exposed as a knob.
Adds a diagnostic panel showing the sampled crop, pixels above threshold, and
the resolved line, because tuning this from numbers alone does not tell you
whether the region being measured is even the right region.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
MediaPipe has no landmarks inside the lips, so teeth have to come from pixels.
Tracing the bright blob would give a new contour every frame with no vertex
correspondence - the exact boil docs/roto-puppet.md warns about.
So the measurement yields a scalar, not a shape: Otsu within the cavity, scanned
from the top for where the bright run stops, giving one line height per frame.
The teeth polygon is the inner lip ring clipped to that line, so the silhouette
is always the mouth's own shape and cannot disagree with the lips around it,
and the only per-frame variable is a single number that smooths trivially.
Presence gets hysteresis and minimum dwell, as plate selection does: a teeth
block blinking on and off for single frames is worse than one simply absent.
Tongue is not implemented. The same scalar approach would apply, gated on
redness rather than brightness, but it is not visible in the test footage - the
cavity reads dark with a bright upper-teeth band and nothing else.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
