Export camera positions so photogrammetric formats: X, Y, Z, and Kappa Phi Omega

[Diego]

Hello Dmitry,

Looked at the sample file with intrinsic and extrinsic parameters?.  I hope that can be imported in this way.  I am aware of your comments.  Thank you very much for your support.

Best Regards,

Diego

[Dmitry Semyonov]

Hello Diego,

The file format you have proposed in the last post seems to include the required intrinsic and extrinsic camera orientation parameters (besides the geographic projection used). But implementing a native support for non-standard formats within PhotoScan seems to me a bad design decision. I hope that PhotoScan will include support for writing custom file format extensions in the future, but unfortunately they are not supported yet.

Nevertheless, we can help you with writing a simple stand-alone converter from the format you have proposed to the PhotoScan structure (xml) format. If you are interested, please provide also a sample photo set with accompanying camera parameters file for testing purposes. It is not necessary to have a large data set, several images should be enough. You can send the data to support@agisoft.ru.

With best regards,
Dmitry Semyonov
AgiSoft LLC

[Diego]

Hello Dmitry,

Thank you very much for your support.  And send test data for application of conversion, thank you very much.

Best Regards,

Diego

[Diego]

Hello Dmitry,

Any progress?

Best Regards,

Diego

[Alexey Pasumansky]

Hello Diego,

Thank you for providing the test data. We have already downloaded it and are now investigating possibility of conversion.

More details would be available at the end of the week. I let you know if there are new questions.

[Diego]

Thanks Alexey,

Excellent news, it would be good if this option was available in formats to import cameras, but a simple application to convert and create the XML format is also an excellent choice.

Regards,

Diego

[tkwasnitschka]

Hi,
I am just about to purchase the pro version (which is GREAT!!!)

Some questions so I understand the camera import right:

1. I have footage and motion data from a deep sea diving robot:
x, y (lat/lon, UTM); z (m); pitch, heading, roll (°).
X and y have large uncertainties, z is better, the rotation data is of high accuracy.
There is no other data to correct for drift in the reconstruction. There is no intrinsic information available (HD footage), but in my tests photoscan outperformed all other products in terms of drift. Can I use this motion data to correct drift during reconstruction? Will the conversion script mentioned above help?

2. Will this data stabilize the drift within the model (=bend it in shape) or merely geographically align it rigidly to achieve a best fit to the camera positions? I would not want to produce countless little individually referenced chunks to get the geometry right...

3. Not having seen the camera export: Is there a way to get a camera position output in a string like t,x,y,z,h,p,r? I have to cross correlate the navigation data first to an initial solution to eliminate a nasty time offset...

Many thanks so far!
Tom

(...Sample footage on photosynth account "kwasnitschka"...)

[Alexey Pasumansky]

Hello Tom,

Thank you for the positive feedback.

Current version of PhotoScan does not stabilize the drift using telemetry data and treats point cloud rigidly (performs only scaling, rotation and shift transformations). Currently it is not possible to correct drift using motion data or camera positions. I hope that support for drift correction (inclusion of known camera coordinates within alignment procedure) will be added to PhotoScan at some point, but it is not implemented yet.

The conversion procedure discussed above applies to the alignment data produced by 3rd party photogrammetric software, so it is not applicable to your case, as telemetry data is of much lower accuracy.

PhotoScan supports several file formats for exporting estimated camera positions. The most close one to t,x,y,z,h,p,r data representation is probably Omega Phi Kappa format. But omega, phi and kappa angles differ from pitch, roll and heading so additional conversion may be required. Export of camera positions and point cloud is available using "Export points..." command from the "File"menu. Unfortunately there was a problem with point export feature in PhotoScan build 958, so you may need to wait for a bug fixing update planned for this weekend.