photoscan and spherical panoramic images

[etmthree]

Hi --

Forgive me if this is an old topic; I did a search of the forums and couldn't find anything. 

I do visual effects for film and television.  I often need to quickly capture medium-resolution 360-degree by 180-degreee spherical panos of sets and locations.  For this purpose I sometimes use a Point Grey Research Ladybug2  camera, which produces in realtime completely aligned and rectified spherical images (video in fact). It would be very helpful to be able to derive the geometry of the set as well, and taking images from multiple vantages would still be very fast with this setup.

Is there a way of using spherical panorama images directly in Photoscan? I would not want to have to chop them into planar projections in order to do the reconstruction.  To my naive thinking, the use of spherical images would actually make feature-matching and camera-solving simpler, as there is no focal length variable and there is basically 100% overlap between image pairs.

Thanks for your help!

[Wishgranter]

hmm interesting idea, mostly its work with Image Based Modeling tools.....  if can export still images, it could go ( it depend on lot of things ) eventualy break to parts..... Can share 2-8 "scenes" fore testing ?

 Private use, if it go will send back ULTRA reconstruction.....

[Alexey Pasumansky]

Hello etmthree,

In the PhotoScan Pro 0.9.1 support for equirectangular spherical images was added.
You can test your data on pre-release and inform us in case of any problems.

The workflow is similar, but before aligning the images you need to choose "Sphere" camera type in Camera Calibration dialog.

[etmthree]

that sounds perfect, Alexey -- thanks!  I'll give it a try.

[Wishgranter]

Woow, Alexey this sound very promising for indoor scenes.....

Etmthree can share results then ?? eventuely can help with processing on ULTRA....... im curious if someone who know how to shoot, what results can be achieved.....

[Kiesel]

Thanks Agisoft, that sounds very promising!!! Why is that not mentioned in the changelog?

Regards

Karsten

[Kiesel]

Oh, excuse me, please! I have overseen this Added support for Spherical camera model for the professional version, unfortunately i only own the standard version  .

Regards

Karsten

[etmthree]

Oops.

I just re-read Alexey's answer more carefully.  Unfortunately for me, I'm in no position to buy a license of Pro. I'm currently under-employed and working on developing new tools for on-set scene capture.

*sigh*  perhaps at some future date then.

[tezen]

@ethmthree&all:
I`m also in no position to buy a Pro-License. But you can do it manually in Standard-Version:
- Align your photos and generate a (LowPoly-) model
- Load that model into another 3D-software and change that LowPoly-Model to a uv-mapped sphere, reorientate to the horizon and upsize it quite high
- Import that sphere into PhotoScan and generate a texture (mosaic-blending and keep uv on)
P.S.: I?d told Agi about this wonderful sideeffect of PhotoScan some time ago - they should implent this automatic one into standard-version too (I pray ) or sell this feature via a "medium" version. It?s quite good for generating highly detailed HDRs in fast time!