Motorized Pano-heads for photoscan?

[driftertravel]

Hello, motorized panoheads seem like an easy way to capture images of interiors and such, I'm wondering if this is a good idea from a technical perspective. If I put the panohead in various orientations in a room and took sets of 360degree shots with a 50% or so overlap would photoscan be apt to process these well? I ask because one of the no-no capturing scenarios in the manual is taking photos in stationary 360degree positons...

[bigben]

I ask because one of the no-no capturing scenarios in the manual is taking photos in stationary 360degree positons...

It's generally a no-no because of the way most people shoot and process the images (ie. not with a panohead and just loading all of the images into Photoscan without grouping them)  It can, however, produce very good results, done properly.

Firstly, you can reduce the amount of overlap within the pano to 10%. Having extra overlap from the same position provides no benefit.

Secondly, you should group all of the the images for each pano and set the group type to camera station. The pano head should be accurately aligned to the NPP (or nodal point if you're old school like me)

Each camera station is effectively a single camera... so to get overlap between cameras for 3D reconstruction you need a lot of panos.  Lot's of furniture through the room, even more cameras. In those cases it may be more practical to shoot a number of panos to get the bulk of the room and then takes several shots through the room with a single camera to fill in the gaps.

...and just a reminder that blank walls are blank walls no matter what camera configuration you use.

[driftertravel]

Just the kind of advice I was looking for. Thanks!

[igor73]

Bigben,  i have a pano head so might try this.   What would be the benefits of using this technique over traditional method ?
Can you set camera station in  the standard version or only in Pro?   

[bigben]

Not sure of the standard version.  It's basically like using a fisheye lens but with a much higher GSD.  You get a lot of tie points between cameras spread across a wide range of angles (remembering that the group is the camera, not the individual images) which is conducive to producing clean point clouds.    You don't have to shoot a full 360° each time, just the area that you're interested in.

Screengrabs show a test mixing 35mm and 15mm fisheye camera stations
https://skfb.ly/Dono