Photoscan texture generation vs DOF

[Andrew]

When acquiring complex sets of shapes, I often end up grabbing some parts in perfect focus while other parts are blurred by DOF (too close or too far from focal plane). However, I always make sure that every square inch of my project is perfectly sharp on at least a couple of photos.

Problem is, Photoscan doesn't always use these sharp photos for texture generation. I try to mask out DOF areas by hand, but on larger datasets this becomes tedious.

Questions:

1. Is there any way of knowing which photo photoscan used to texture selected area?
2. PS ver 1.0.0 has this 'Estimate image quality' feature to quantify image sharpness (or perhaps it quantifies other qualities of a photo?), does this mean PS can/could use this data to pick sharpest photo parts for texturing?
3. Could it be possible to use image quality data to automatically (with adjustable tolerance) mask out blurred areas in photos?

-Andrew

[admir]

Did you try disabling blurred images when creating textures. If you disable them, PS wont use them while creating textures.

Admir

[Andrew]

In real world scenarios there are situations where photos contain both vital sharp areas, and areas where parts of your subject are out of focus. High f-stop and smart shooting plan can minimize this, but often can't elliminate completely.

So disabling entire photo during texture generation is not an option.

I know that with enough manual masking, areas out of focus can be excluded from texturing, but most of them do not actually affect texturing, only some do, so perhaps there are ways to point which photo contributed blur in the texture, or have PS help disregard blurry photo areas (blur-aware texturing algorithm, masking tool etc.)

-Andrew

[Andrew]

Seems this thread got burried before anyone from Agisoft (or anyone else with knowledge) could chime in.

To recap my main question: is there a way in PS to detect which photo was used to project specific part of textured scan?

The reason for this is, due to difficult shooting conditions, my photos occasionaly have too shallow DOF to capture everything in focus. I need whatever is sharp in these photos for good reconstruction, but I often need to discard out of focus areas by tedious masking. Not every OOF image part needs to be masked out, sometimes PS makes a good call and picks from sharp photos, so masking out every OOF pixel in all images seems like a waste of time - If only I knew which photos PS chooses for texturing specific areas.

Thanks,
Andrew

[Alexey Pasumansky]

Hello Andrew,

Estimate Quality feature works for the whole image and is not that intellectual to understand the blurred areas on each image and to mask them. The result of quality estimation is not used by PhotoScan algorithms but could help user to find blurred photos.
So there are only two options - disabling image completely or mask some parts of it.

For texturing PhotoScan uses cameras that are looking in the direction parallel to the surface normal in the area being textured.