Messages

31

General / Re: Import Laserscan data -registration lost

« on: January 23, 2021, 07:07:00 PM »

Thanks for putting together the example data set Dieter and I agree with the other posts that the laser scan support as currently implemented is not very useful.

I think the current approach of attempting to find and match key points in a panorama representation of a laser scan is also fundamentally limited. Compared to a photo, even high resolution scans are fairly low resolution making the task difficult. Furthermore, many scans are done without color so key points that are identified in IR reflectance may not correspond to ones in color images. If scans are captured with color, that means an additional calibration between the scanner's internal camera and it's measured 3D points, which may introduce an additional source of error.

I think it would be much better to follow an approach similar to what is described in the paper:

A Fast and Robust Framework for Semiautomatic and Automatic Registration of Photographs to 3D Geometry

which describes an algorithm for using known 3D geometry to refine the estimated external and internal camera parameters. This would be a much more general solution and would eliminate many of the limitations of the current implementation.

32

General / Re: 1.7.0. Results of reworked depth maps generation algorithm

« on: January 09, 2021, 09:28:45 PM »

Let's just say there aren't many other programs out there that are quite a bit faster than Metashape... I don't think we should elaborate on other software here.

Why shouldn't we be able to mention other software? This whole poisonous idea that you shouldn't talk about other software originated on the RealityCapture forums where the mods put in place draconian rules to that effect. Nothing exists in a vacuum and pretending that it does is foolish. All of the photogrammetry tools have improved significantly in the last few years and I think that is in no small part due to the competition between them and the ability to see what does and doesn't work well in the various packages.

One thing I really appreciate about Agisoft is the way they interact with their users, particularly on this forum. They are very receptive to feedback and constructive criticism, which ultimately makes their product better. That is distinctly different than the RealityCapture forums where users get banned for voicing criticism, which I think is incredibly shortsighted on their part. In the long run the best software is always developed based on user feedback and if the developers aren't capable of collecting and listening to that feedback their software will not improve as efficiently as the software of their competitors who do.

33

General / Re: Plans for detailed manual?

« on: November 26, 2020, 07:55:20 PM »

Agreed. The documentation could use a lot of work. I really like the software, but whenever somebody asks me about it the poor documentation is a caveat I always need to bring up.

34

Python and Java API / Re: How to get file path?

« on: November 17, 2020, 12:57:57 AM »

Is this what you're after?

Code: [Select]

from os import path

current_doc = Metashape.app.document.path
current_dir = path.dirname(current_doc)

35

Bug Reports / Re: Freenas local network processing

« on: November 02, 2020, 07:59:18 PM »

Nobody used / uses freenas to store and work on projects ?

We use it as our main storage mounted as SMB from Windows machines and haven't run in to any issues. I'm afraid I can't be more help than that.

Maybe you're running in to issues with the special characters in your paths? We try to limit them to the set: a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _, -.

36

General / Re: Agisoft Metashape 1.7.0 pre-release

« on: October 28, 2020, 08:24:27 PM »

It seems a lot of manual work to input the coordinates of each laser setup (and presumably orientation?) to ensure they stay fixed. I take great care over my registration and wouldn't trust any algorithm to do a better job! We treat our laser data as sacred and once it is registered everything else (so many things...) is derived from it, but can not be allowed to affect it!

Agreed 100%. Treating laser scans as fixed should be the default behavior. Perhaps other users have a use-case where they should be freely adjusted but I strongly suspect that is a minority position, in which case, it should require additional settings to achieve.

If setting scan locations and rotations is the way to prevent scans from moving that should happen automatically during import and their accuracy weights set high enough that they do not move at all during future alignments.

37

General / Re: Agisoft Metashape 1.7.0 pre-release

« on: October 24, 2020, 11:01:32 PM »

[For laser scans] Current approach is the following:
...
- run Align Photos operation as usual.

Does that mean that the poses of the laser scans will be adjusted in addition to the internal and external parameters calculated for the standard cameras?

As a user who commonly combines laser scan data with photogrammetry that is not at all what I would want to happen. The laser scan data will almost always be coming from other software where we have much more control over the alignment process. Therefore the laser scan data should be treated as fixed (no pose adjustments) and photos aligned to it.

I haven't had a chance to test the implementation in Metashape 1.7.0 extensively yet. However, my past experience with the general method of treating scans as spherical panoramas for alignment purposes suggests that the results will likely be very unstable. The resulting panoramas are typically low resolution and, if they are intensity only scans, relatively low contrast; so few tie points are likely to be detected by Metashape's feature detector. From the few small tests I've tried on 1.7.0 that is indeed what seems to be happening.

From a process efficiency perspective, what I want to do as a user is use intensity only scans to capture geometry and photogrammetry to capture color.

38

Python and Java API / Re: Metashape v1.6 downscale parameter

« on: October 04, 2020, 05:44:12 AM »

It would be great if this info was included in the API documentation.

39

Bug Reports / Re: Program crashes when trying to open (1.6.4)

« on: October 03, 2020, 04:33:12 AM »

Nahimic is the worst. I've lost count of how many times I've tried to kill it. This is what I did most recently and it seems to be holding for the moment. Credit goes to Reddit user qtschk.

• Go to device manager and in properties for nahimic check and copy the hardware id. The devices I blocked are "Software Components > A-Volute Nh3 Audio Effects Component" and "Sound, Video, and Game Controllers > Nahimic mirroring device"
• Go to local group policy editor Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Device Installation > Device Installation Restrictions.
• Double click the "Prevent installation of devices that match any of these device IDs" and change its status to enabled.
• As the device ID type the nahimic id from step 1.
• Reboot to make sure the policy is fully applied
• Go to device manager and uninstall the nahimic devices from step 1.
• Watch with irrational joy as the devices attempt to reinstall themselves but are blocked.

This method should work until Nahimic decides to change their Hardware Ids. Note that you could also define this as a domain level group policy to kill Nahimic on every machine.

40

General / Re: Fine-level task subdivision performance

« on: May 12, 2020, 02:36:04 AM »

Depending on the dataset, alignment results seem to be pretty variable from run to run even when using exactly the same settings so I'd be a little wary about interpreting to much based on only a few runs (n=4 in your case?).

41

General / Re: EXIF Tags for GPS accuracy

« on: April 24, 2020, 06:02:22 PM »

I'd be interested in this info too. Would it be possible to include in the docs?

42

Feature Requests / Re: On-line searchable Python API

« on: March 20, 2020, 11:58:12 PM »

++1

43

General / Re: Clarify confidence intervals of accuracy terms?

« on: January 16, 2020, 02:48:34 AM »

+1

I'd love to see this clarified as well.

44

General / Re: Metadata description

« on: December 09, 2019, 09:17:43 PM »

Even without considering exports I think it would be very useful to be able to store arbitrary metadata as key value pairs within the project file.

Tags like Author and Description could certainly be useful at export time, but I've also wanted to use various pieces of metadata about a project to control how it's processed by automated scripts.  Right now we store that metadata separately as a sidecar file, but it would be very convenient to have it directly accessible within the software.

45

General / Re: export in obj : binary encoding disabled?

« on: December 01, 2019, 07:39:04 PM »

Obj's are big dumb text files so binary encoding is not applicable.