NAvigating through photos

[Patribus]

Hello,

I would very much like to see the possibility to navigate through Next Nearest Neighbor (NNN) photos. I.e. when viewing at a photo (for instance to identify GCPs or special features in the image, which you want to track) I would like to be able to navigate to the NNN photo above, below, left, right, in front or behind just with the use of cursors or some interactive UI.

This would be a very important feature when trying to track a feature in your images which looks very different in two or more distant photos due to perspective changes. 

The more I spend time working with PS,
the more I see which tools and features I would presently need for my work,
 so please apologize me for posting suggestions almost at a daily basis 

[Alexey Pasumansky]

Hello Patribus,

You can place marker in the point of interest and use Filter By Marker option to leave only those images in the Photos pane that actually contain markers' projection.

[Patribus]

Yes, that I know and I do in fact use this feature.

But it would still be more practical to be able to 'navigate' between neighboring photos for the reasons I mentioned above.

The problem with the marker is: I do setup a marker in one or two images which appears at a completely different place on some other distant photo due to the misalignment (which you want to correct). In this other photo it is difficult to identify the point one has chosen before because of the extreme different perspective. If it would be possible just to navigate through the photo the user would be able to understand how the point of interest he chose changes in form jumping from one image to the next near lying image, being able to identify the sport (or feature) again several photos 'away'. I do not know if this is clear :-P

Cheers

[Alexey Pasumansky]

But wouldn't the subset of photos selected by marker presence contain all the necessary photos for the user? You can even use standard selection tools to select a bunch of neighboring images (Filter by Selection feature).

And if there are misaligned images, what would be the neighbor-selection criterion?

[Patribus]

The navigation issues as I'm describing would surely be a luxury.

And if there are misaligned images, what would be the neighbor-selection criterion?

Concerning the neighboring issue, I would imagine something like selecting an certain number of next nearest neighbors [NNN] (where the user will eventually be able to choose how many photos to consider).
The result does not need to be in a certain relation to the actual image: i.e., lets say the user chooses to make 5 NNN's available for navigation, these might lie all on one side of the actual image, or distributed in all possible directions. A preview shows the user which these photos are and allows him to choose in which direction (i.e. to which photo) to navigate next.

I also just remembered where I used something similar to this, namely in photosynth from Microsoft (it was some time ago, I suppose the software still has this feature). It allowed to move through the scene extremely fast.

But wouldn't the subset of photos selected by marker presence contain all the necessary photos for the user? You can even use standard selection tools to select a bunch of neighboring images (Filter by Selection feature).

This surely does also the job, but when you are working with several thousand images -as I am -, it becomes a very exhausting job. Also because each time you have to select the images manually from the image list, which are not ordered by position, but by some other parameters. So that it can happen that the neighboring photo you are looking for is a few hundred places lower in the list. Even in my projects, where I'm working with marker filtering, I have several hundred images in the list.

Well, the navigation thing was only an idea, which would make the working in PS much more fast and dynamic. 

Best regards

[Alexey Pasumansky]

This surely does also the job, but when you are working with several thousand images -as I am -, it becomes a very exhausting job. Also because each time you have to select the images manually from the image list, which are not ordered by position, but by some other parameters.

You can also select cameras in the Model view using available selection tools, after that just right-click in the Model view and choose Filter By Selection.

[Patribus]

HI,

yes, I do also use this feature.


I found a soft which does what I described above. In fact the makers compare themself with PhotoSynth on their pages (second link).

One example: http://www.visualsize.com/photonav3d/viewer/bigbudda.html
And here a list of examples: http://www.visualsize.com/photonav3d/summary.html

Maybe you already know this.

Ok, that's it.

Best regards

[James]

Have you seen this one Patribus?

http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/photocloud/

Last year i managed to get this to work with a dataset from photoscan, in a convoluted way i dont completely remember involving exporting via meshlab.

I think it does what you are talking about, in a more responsive way than photonav3d, and i do agree it would be nice to have something like this in photoscan, although i have to also agree with alexey that if the photos aren't correctly aligned then it's usefulness may be limited in those situations...

[Patribus]

Hello James,

thank you for your hint. In fact I did not know the software.

There is one point I do not understand.  To start in the PhotoCloud Index Generator I'm supposed to import a  "mlp" MeshLab project file. But how do I export my PS point cloud and/or oriented images into Meshlab to export/save it subsequently as a .mlp project?

Could you give me a hint?

--

As it seems, this is the type o navigation I was talking about, which with all the features already implemented in PS (markers, camera positions, selection possibilities, filter, etc & etc) would make PS unbeatable.

And yes, if the images are not correctly aligned, this feature would not be so usefull (or maybe yes, because one could indentify where the error is!?), but then, also other present features in PS have their problems if images are not well aligned, since a 'good' aligment is the starting point to work efectively in PS.

What I also miss in PS is the network of image-relations, i.e. a visual output of which images have common points of interest with which images, and how many links exist between these images. OK, there is is the 'View Matches' list per each photo, but to be honest, I cannot really work with this output 'cause it's not really practical.
Such an image relation network would be very useful as an interactive UI output. One could quickly identify weak points in the image acquisition and eventually remake the respective links or add point manually on images which overlapp but have low level of linkage.

This combined with the photo navigation function would make of PS a working tool bomb ;-).

I think this will remain a dream for a while.

Cheers

[James]

Some of this is from memory...

You need to export your cameras from photoscan as a bundler .out format, then create a text file listing the filename of each image followed by a 0 and the focal length in pixels.

it should look like:

Code: [Select]

DSC_7606.JPG 0 5094.68
DSC_7607.JPG 0 5094.68
DSC_7608.JPG 0 5094.68
DSC_7609.JPG 0 5094.68
DSC_7610.JPG 0 5094.68
...
Then in meshlab go to 'open project' and select your bundler .out file, it will then prompt you for the camera list .txt file.

This will eventually open in meshlab as a sparse point cloud.

Save it as a meshlab .mlp file and it should be good to go into photocloudindexer.