Messages

1

General / Re: Leica ADS100 support?

« on: July 12, 2025, 02:02:27 AM »

I discovered that I can clip a TIFF with RPCs using gdal_translate -srcwin. GDAL outputs a TIFF file with the corrected RPC tags. The only change is in the line offset and sample offset.  The clipped images can then be used to test parameters in Metashape over a smaller area than the full images.

If there's a way to generate depth maps over only a portion of an image, that would be more convenient, but this work around is pretty simple.

2

General / Re: Leica ADS100 support?

« on: July 11, 2025, 08:18:57 PM »

Hi Alexey,

The images are about 310k pixels by 20k pixels and 16 bit. They're about 17-20 GB per image. I tried depth map generation with a smaller region and mask but it still takes about a day for a single pair.

Let me know how I can send you the project and example images.

P.S.
Sorry I didn't see your reply here and started a new dedicated thread, which you can ignore if you want.

3

General / Generate depth maps for only part of image?

« on: July 11, 2025, 08:15:31 PM »

I'm working with Leica ADS100 images to generate dense clouds and want to test different parameters, but the images are huge - 310k pixels by 20k pixels, 16 bit. I've tried resizing the region and masking out most of the image except a small test area. The output depth maps only cover the unmasked area, but the process still takes as long as if the images were not masked (~1 day for 1 stereo pair on high quality). I believe the full images are still being used during depth map generation.

Is there any way I can restrict depth map generation to a small portion of the images so that I can run the dense cloud process quickly over small areas for testing?

4

General / Re: Leica ADS100 support?

« on: July 10, 2025, 07:44:10 PM »

To anyone else who is curious the answer is yes. If you merge the TIFF files of ADS100 images and produce RPCs in other software then Metashape will use them correctly and produce good results for processes like dense cloud generation.

The challenge I'm facing now is that the images are so big that parameter testing with even a single pair takes a long time. Resizing the region and masking images doesn't appear to save time in depth map generation.

5

General / Optimize Cameras with RPCs?

« on: June 23, 2025, 11:05:35 PM »

Metashape is able to load TIFFs with RPCs, but is it able to optimize cameras and generate corrected RPCs?

I've loaded some images with RPCs that need to be corrected. I ran align cameras to generate tie points and added several ground control points. When I run optimize cameras after altering various aspects (filtering tie points, changing camera accuracy, turning off control points, etc.) the solution does appear to change. The estimated locations or pixel errors change. However, when I use the API to then export RPCs, they're the same as when I first loaded the images. Is Metashape still updating the camera calibration internally, but not storing the changes in the RPCModel object? Is there a way I can get it to update the RPCs?

Also, why are the RPCs from the originally loaded images different than the RPCs in the TIFF tags? All the line and sample coefficients are different and the offsets get changed to 0.

6

General / Leica ADS100 support?

« on: June 09, 2025, 10:16:23 PM »

Would Metashape be able to create dense point clouds from Leica ADS100 images?

This an aerial digital pushbroom system with forward, nadir, and back looking sensors used for stereo capture. The data comes in SOCET support file format with a number of separate TIFF files (called blocks) forming one image. There are a number of corresponding auxiliary files including a camera calibration file (.cam) and exterior orientation stored in a (.odf) file.

Metashape supports satellite pushbroom sensors with RPC (rational polynomial coefficient) info in a text file. If I merged the TIFF blocks and then created an RPC text file from the existing auxiliary files, would the data work correctly in Metashape?

7

Feature Requests / Export Seamlines

« on: January 15, 2016, 03:16:45 AM »

Is it possible to export the seamlines generated by PhotoScan?
Is there any way to access these seamlines through the python API?

I'd like to have a shapefile of where different images are used in the orthomosaic, and then possibly edit this shapefile and re-import it as 'shapes' to have greater control over orthomosaic generation.

8

General / Re: Using photoscan's orientation results in Imagine/Leica Photogrammetry suite

« on: November 07, 2015, 08:17:03 AM »

Hi jmos,
There may be some compatibility issues between how PhotoScan writes Inpho project files and how Imagine will read them. This is the case with another photogrammetry package, SURE, as you can see noted in this manual on the top of page 6. I haven't tried using Inpho project files and no longer have access to StereoAnalyst so I can't say for certain whether the Inpho files work correctly.

You may want to do a couple quick checks to see if the imported parameters are correct. One way to do this would be to import cameras by the method I specified above, then compare measurements and locations made with both methods. Another way would be to compare locations and measurements made with StereoAnalyst to GPS field measurements or measurements made in another orthomosaic covering the same area.

9

General / Re: LAS intensity?

« on: June 18, 2015, 04:32:27 PM »

Thanks Alexey. When the master channel is set to default the intensity value isn't consistently the same as any of the LAS R-G-B values for the point and it doesn't seem to be a combination of them. So I'm still a bit confused what it means when set to default, but I can reprocess with a particular channel to get what I want. 

10

General / LAS intensity?

« on: June 17, 2015, 03:16:01 AM »

What is the source of the Intensity value for points exported in LAS format?

My images are four channels (R-G-B-NIR) and I performed dense cloud generation with the master channel set to default. I'd like to calculate point intensity metrics over an area (min, max, mean, etc of intensity) so I need to know where this intensity info is coming from. It would be really nice if there were a setting to choose a particular channel for the intensity value since I'd like to use the NIR channel.

11

General / Re: Digitisation workflow for historical aerial photographs...

« on: May 22, 2015, 02:28:50 AM »

Hi Bigben,
You're using PTGui to align the fiducials of images taken with the same camera and lens, correct? Could you could provide a brief overview of your workflow for this step? I haven't used PTGui before, but I might try to implement a similar step in my own work with historical images.

Since you're working with non-photogrammetric scanners/cameras you might want to consider calibration of the scanner so you can remove it's distortions before correcting for the camera lens distortion in PhotoScan. It might also save you some time to develop an auto advance mechanism if you're working with rolls of film. Someone I'm working with is implementing these steps into their workflow for processing historical imagery.

12

General / Re: Point cloud density over trees

« on: May 22, 2015, 01:03:28 AM »

I get the same effect. I doubt it's because of any precision requirement in the software. The quality setting specifies the image resolution used during dense matching: Ultra = original pixel, High = 1/4 original, Medium = 1/16 original, etc. At a fine scale features may appear very different in two images, but when you coarsen the image those features are likely to appear more similar in the separate images because you've reduced the local variability.

The result of using a lower quality setting on rough surfaces like tree canopies is a lower point density (because there are fewer pixels to match), but you often a greater coverage of points (because it's easier to find matches). Higher quality setting are likely to yield more accurate point locations which can be important if you want to get accurate height measurements when working with coarse imagery. For UAV applications where the approximate ground sampling distance is less than 10cm this is probably less important, but when working with imagery that has a gsd >30cm I've found my height measurements for trees are significantly more accurate with Ultra quality.

What still baffles me is that I often get better coverage with Aggressive filtering. I wish someone would explain the filtering settings to me more clearly.

13

General / Re: Generate pointcloud of 266 Ultracam X photos

« on: April 24, 2015, 04:26:58 PM »

Alexey provided me with a tiling script that helped me to generate a dense cloud with 1000 images and only 48gb of ram, but it took several weeks. The script is available in one or two places on this forum, but I have an updated version with a few useful modifications. Message me if you're interested.

14

General / Re: Satellite Image WV3 - Working with PS?

« on: April 17, 2015, 06:24:54 PM »

WV3 is a line scanning / pushbroom sensor. The imaging geometry is different from a frame sensor such as a digital camera. 

I don't think photoscan would be able to solve for sensor location because the sensor is constantly moving as it collects each line of data. The lens geometry is also completely different than a frame camera. Usually you need to work with software that can handle Rational Polynomial Coefficients (RPCs) which are delivered with the images and provide a simple approximation of satellite ephemeris and the optics. Or you need to use software that has a rigorous sensor model which can handle actual sensor parameters rather than an equation that approximates it.

I would be extremely surprised if WV3 worked in PhotoScan which is only designed to handle frame images, but if you can get some sample images then by all means give it a shot.

15

General / Re: Export Map of Image Overlap

« on: March 04, 2015, 06:42:43 AM »

I haven't tried it myself, but I believe this forum topic has a script which will export image footprints:
http://www.agisoft.com/forum/index.php?topic=2666.0

There are a few things that people implement with scripts which I think should just be a standard feature of the photoscan gui. This is one of them.