Messages

16

General / Re: Agisoft Metashape 1.7.0 pre-release

« on: January 05, 2021, 03:41:18 PM »

Hey Alexey, can you explain what Generate Defocus Masks is?

Also very interested to know what this does and how it works.

Thanks,
JRP

Hi jrp,
I did some tests with this feature and it creates a mask in out-of-focus areas of the image. It seems to be similiar to Photoshops "Focus Area" tool, where based on local contrast etc. blurred parts are masked but it seems to be more sophisticated since you require a scaled model for the mask to work.
The results are great and this is super useful for creating textures without having to deal with out-of-focus areas being mapped to the texture.
This could also be useful when working with small objects where depth of field is always a problem: Create a rough, scaled model with all images, run the filter, realign with created masks (excluding feature detection on masked areas) and then running the high-res reconstruction. But I'm sure Alexey will clarify the use cases.
Thanks Agisoft team! Great update <3

17

General / Re: Artifacts in DEMs derived from scanned air photos

« on: November 18, 2020, 12:05:35 PM »

I've had this before and it was due to a slight misalignment of the camera pose. For me, disabling generic preselection solved this issue. Of course, the alignment time was a looot longer.
Cheers.

18

Feature Requests / Re: Feature Request : Logfile per Project

« on: November 18, 2020, 12:03:59 PM »

+1
Having the logfile stored in the project file would be very convient!

19

Bug Reports / Re: 60% performance increase after checking "Use CPU when performing..."

« on: November 12, 2020, 08:54:33 PM »

Hi PolarNick,
I updated the original post. Seems as if there were some internal changes.
Cheers!

p.s. I've noticed with another datasets (UAV images), that the reduction in processing times between checked/ unchecked seems to be largely dependend on the type of data acquisition- I'm still doing some testing, will update.

20

Bug Reports / 60% performance increase after checking "Use CPU when performing..."

« on: November 11, 2020, 05:23:09 PM »

Hi all,
actually this is not a bug but more of a heads-up to fellow Metashape users.

I'm currently running some tests to compare different settings. During my test, I noticed a significant boost in performance when checking "Use CPU when performing GPU accelerated processing" even though it says "When using dedicated GPUs please turn off ... CPU for optimal perfomance".
Here are the times (Metashape 1.6.5):

Unchecked:          6 hours 25 min (Depth maps), 32min (Build model)
Checked:               4 hours 9 min (Depth maps), 32min (Build model)
Unchecked 1.7:  1 hours 56 min (Depth maps), 35 min (Build model)
Checked 1.7:       2 hours 8 min (Depth maps) , 32 min (Build model)
 
Additional information: 269x 36mp images of a animal skull (i.e. turntable style data acquisition). Depthmap-based reconstruction in ultra high quality.
System: Threadripper 3960X, 256GB 3200 CL16, 1080ti, Samsung Evo Plus 970 Raid0 2TB.

My guess for the significant increase in performance is the high CPU core count of the 3960X. So it might be only helpful when using an HEDT system.
What I also find very interesting is the additional performance improvement of 1.7.0.11429. Speed-wise this is on-par with competing software. I'll be posting some comparisions in the 1.7 thread.
Hope this helps someone.
Cheers,
Arie.

21

General / Re: Dense Point Cloud Processing cut off a lot of points

« on: October 27, 2020, 01:17:45 PM »

IMO the water surrounding the pier is responsible for no points being reconstructed since the waters surface appearance changes between each image.
If you want the pier to be reoncstructed, you could try masking out all water for the images in the immediate surrounding of the pier.
Cheers!

22

General / Re: geo-refrenced orthomosaic photos exported with wrong coordinates

« on: September 21, 2020, 05:28:40 PM »

Hi again,
i'm not sure how well this works with Metashape, but you can generate topographic height contours and import them into AutoCAD. If Metashape creates proper 3D-polylines, it should give you a nice, simplified version of the excavation.
I know it is possible in Cloudcompare. You could also generate cross-sections, export them as polyline and use in CAD. I'll be happy to send you a link to that tool. I'm not sure if I can post it here.
Cheers!

23

General / Re: Texture production - "Falling back to legacy parametrization" - meaning?

« on: September 21, 2020, 05:21:29 PM »

Hi,
have you tried updating your graphic card drivers? Is the GPU detected by Metashape?
Cheers!
p.s. as a general rule, your texture size should be a power of 2 i.e. 2048x2048, 4096x4096 etc. It helps performance.

24

General / Re: LIDAR Point Cloud Mesh

« on: September 18, 2020, 07:07:41 PM »

Hey Darko,
attached are some screenshots o the results from some quick processing in cloudcompare. I just calculated the normals with a priority on the z-axis and used the poisson surface reconstruction (afaik Agisoft uses the same algorithm for meshing point clouds).
The mesh would still need to be edited, i.e. removing the lower parts and maybe smoothing the topography out a little. After that you could manually remove the castle from the LIDAR mesh, remove the vegetation from the photogrammetric mesh and merge the two. That would give you a starting point for creating a halfway decent 3D-print.
I would also strongly advise to use the new depth-map based reconstruction for the castle. The resulting mesh should be more detailed.
Cheers!

p.s. Do you want the mesh? Or would you rather recreate it in Cloudcompare yourself?

25

General / Re: LIDAR Point Cloud Mesh

« on: September 18, 2020, 11:52:14 AM »

Hey Darko,
unfortunately, I don't see an easy and fast approach considering the type of data and your intented use case.
If you don't mind sharing the LIDAR cloud, I'd be happy to take a look at it.
Cheers!

26

General / Re: Minimum percent overlap

« on: September 18, 2020, 11:37:56 AM »

You fail to mention, that this is done with highly specialized equipment, such as metric cameras....
One needs a accurate DEM to compute an accurate orthoimage. With consumer-grade equipment you will not be able to achieve that with a 60% forward and 25% sideward overlap.
Cheers!

27

General / Re: I9-9900K upgrade

« on: September 18, 2020, 11:31:33 AM »

Hi Henrik.
I've just been in a similiar position on upgrading my PC and I had the same questions regarding the benefits of high core count.
In the end, I went with the Threadripper 3960X (24 core). On the one hand, it is very convenient to be able to just assign half of the cores to Metashape and being able to continue working on something else without much lag (I have a dedicated GPU just for display).

If you work with chunks, you can process multiple chunks in separate instances of Metashape, which increases perfomance (somewhere at Pudget that possibility was even mentioned).  In addition, I work with other software (Blender, GIS etc.) which can utilize the cores more efficiently. And I would expect Agisoft et al. to optimize their algorithms for larger amount of cores in the near future since high core count has just recently become so widespread. Also, the amount of PCIe lanes the TRX40 platforms offers can be quite useful when working with many M.2/ PCIe SSDs.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask away.
Cheers!

p.s. for a cluster you will need a separate license for each node.

28

Bug Reports / Re: agisoft.com - Private messages broken (?)

« on: September 17, 2020, 10:17:48 AM »

Hi Alexey,
seems like this bug has been fixed.
Thanks!

29

Feature Requests / Tweaking generic preselection to increase alignment accuracy

« on: September 15, 2020, 07:27:26 PM »

Dear Agisoft team,
is it possible to tweak the settings to change the resolution of the images used for generic preselection?
Being able to adjust this setting would let the user decide the balance between accuracy and processing time.
Cheers!

30

Bug Reports / Re: agisoft.com - Private messages broken (?)

« on: September 15, 2020, 02:48:50 PM »

Alexey, thank you.
And James, thanks for the work-around!