Messages

31

General / Masking transparent parts of images

« on: March 21, 2019, 09:27:22 AM »

Hi,
I am trying to eliminate a large amount of unwanted background noise in a model by changing specific colours to transparent in a batch process, saving the images as PNGs, and redirecting Photoscan to use those images to texture the model.  The workflow seems to work well, only the "transparent" areas are being rendered as white, whereas I wish to eliminate the areas totally.  I am using Photoscan 1.4.5.  Does anyone have any suggestions or indeed maybe a different approach? Maybe there is a process where one can automatically mask out the transparent areas, but I dont know how to do this.
Thanks!

32

General / Re: Info missing

« on: March 07, 2019, 10:28:47 PM »

You are right!  I feel like an idiot!!   
Thanks

33

General / Re: Info missing

« on: March 07, 2019, 06:28:39 PM »

Gentle reminder please Alex

34

General / Re: Info missing

« on: March 06, 2019, 12:58:09 AM »

Hi Alexey, please find attached
Regards,
John

35

General / Info missing

« on: March 05, 2019, 09:58:43 AM »

Hi
Using Photoscan 1.4.5, and my info data (showing number of points in a model) has disappeared.  I've tried all sorts of things, even reinstalling, but for nothing.  The option is selected under the Model...Show Info setting.  This seemed to happen after I also installed Metashape on the same PC.
Any help would be appreciated
Thanks
John

36

Bug Reports / Re: Speed of 1.3.2 onwards vs 1.3.0

« on: December 30, 2017, 08:07:49 PM »

Ok Alexey, many thanks for the details!  I will spend some time to try to understand 
Best wishes for the New Year!

37

Bug Reports / Re: Speed of 1.3.2 onwards vs 1.3.0

« on: December 30, 2017, 07:26:05 PM »

Hi Alexey,
So sorry seems I have a typo!
My readings should have been as follows:

The dense cloud build comparative timings and resultant number of points is as follows:
1.3.0 - Depth Map 00:32:50, Dense Cloud 00:28:54, Points 56,043,481
1.3.4 - Depth Map 00:19:24, Dense Cloud 07:39:00, Points 26,606,884

I understand the improvement in time for the depth map (better GPU utilization)...however reduction in speed for the dense cloud is many orders of magnitude, around 15x.  Maybe I am not understanding any benefits resulting from the change....

Thanks

John

38

Bug Reports / Speed of 1.3.2 onwards vs 1.3.0

« on: December 30, 2017, 06:08:27 PM »

I'm currently doing a benchmarking exercise to compare speeds of different machines, including Azure based VMs, and in doing so I seem to be experiencing a massive difference in performance between v 1.3.0 versus v 1.3.2 & v1.3.4 (the versions I have tested) for the dense cloud build.

I have a fully aligned data set of 1509 photographs, which i am running through an Azure NV24 VM machine.  This is quite a powerful machine with 24 cores and 2 x Tesla M60 GPUs, see screen grab.

The dense cloud build comparative timings and resultant number of points is as follows:
1.3.0 - Depth Map 00:32:50, Dense Cloud 07:39:00, Points 56,043,481
1.3.4 - Depth Map 00:19:24, Dense Cloud 00:28:54, Points 26,606,884

So note the MASSIVE difference in time to build the dense cloud.

All processing parameters were of course identical.

Interesting also is that the depth map took substantially SHORTER time using 1.3.4, but also the number of resulting points is much less, around half, yet another strange thing. 

What I noticed during the processing of the depth maps on 1.3.0 was that the GPUs were maxing out at around 10-12% each...could explain the timing difference here.

But of course the most significant factor is the timing on the dense cloud part, and also the difference in point count.

Any ideas?  Is this a bug in 1.3.2 and later versions?

Thanks

John

 

39

General / Re: Dense Point Cloud calculation taking suspiciously long time on AWS EC2 Instance

« on: December 30, 2017, 10:39:48 AM »

Hi Farza,
By any chance are you running the identical version of Photoscan on the EC2 machine as on your other test machine, or are you running a different version, if so, what versions?
Thanks
John

40

General / Older versions

« on: December 30, 2017, 10:37:09 AM »

Hi
Is there any way to download older versions of Photoscan?
The reason I am asking is that together with a colleague i am currently conducting some benchmarks on different machines,including Azure based VMs, and I am suspecting a significant performance drop in the dense cloud generation phase (at least with our with our test dataset), after version 1.3.0. 
Thanks
John

41

General / Re: Agisoft PhotoScan 1.4.0 pre-release

« on: December 26, 2017, 07:11:29 PM »

Hello John,

In the build 5543 you can select the points that includes the problematic area (no need to have an accurate selection) while looking from top, then in the Tools Menu select Dense Cloud -> Invert Point Normals option and in the related dialog check on "Opposite normals" option only. In this case only incorrectly oriented normals will be inverted.

Works perfectly! Thanks very much.

42

General / Re: Agisoft PhotoScan 1.4.0 pre-release

« on: December 16, 2017, 05:50:53 PM »

Hello jinjamu,

It seems that the normals for the points in the middle are inverted. Can you try using Invert Normals option in the Tools menu for the selected points?

Hi Alexey,
Indeed you are correct!
Is there an easy way to select the points that need inversion?  Manually is not so easy.
Is this something that will be corrected in future releases?
Regards
John

43

General / Re: Agisoft PhotoScan 1.4.0 pre-release

« on: December 16, 2017, 12:41:28 PM »

Hi Dmitry,
Release 1.4 looks great!  The new "Import Points" feature has allowed me to test a workflow where I take a point cloud out of Photoscan into CloudCompare which provides great features for editing point clouds (I am working on underwater models which can get quite "noisy" and require some manual editing), and then import the clean point cloud back into PS in order to mesh and texture.
However, one particular model I am working on ended up with a chunk of points missing when I did the import, and this was the case for both PLY and LAS file formats.
Attached you can see the point cloud imported with the missing chunk (empty piece in the middle), and also shown in cloud compare completely whole
I'm thinking this could be a software issue?
Thanks!

44

General / Re: Photoscan Pro on cloud based virtual machine

« on: December 02, 2017, 06:52:30 PM »

There's some info here, but a google search will find you much more
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-n-series-general-availability-on-december-1/
I have used the NV machines extensively.  Same performance as the NC machines, not sure the actual technical differences.  Price varies depending on the size of VM you select from around $1 to $5 per hour.
They work great to process models, but not so great if you need to edit on screen, as you'll need a really good bandwidth to have a decent user experience.
Just remember to switch off when you are done, otherwise you keep paying.
I think you can open a trial account and get $70 free usage, to try it out.

45

General / Re: Bringing a dense cloud back into photoscan

« on: December 02, 2017, 06:42:08 PM »

Thanks Alexey
I need the process to work as though the imported dense cloud is generated from the point cloud in photoscan, so there needs to be a "connection" (sorry, don't know the right words!) with the original photographs, to be able to texture the generated mesh.
Before I start to test, is there anything in particular to look out for?