Speed, memory requirements, quality. Comparison between Photoscan and Acute3D

[Vlad]

After some fails, because of lack of memory in >3 days of calculations of dense clouds on not so old computer with 32Gb DDR4, i7 6700, gtx960 and IntelHD, i try to search for competitors.
RealityCapture for this moment in deep beta, and former Acute3D ContextCapture for this moment looks like most fastest and amazing in quality photogrammetry tools.

Interesting comparison between Photoscan and Acute3D
https://community.acute3d.com/forum/agisoft-photoscan-acute3d-smart3dcapture

How this is possible, when Photoscan use both GPU at 100%, and eat all memory, competitors can work >3x time faster using only about 10-20% of only one GPU (Acute3D) and required about half of 32Gb memory for work with huge (in terms of photoscan) amount of photos?
And quality of photoscan results worster than from competitors

This is worst situation when calculation take 2-3 days but you can lost all your work, because you can't save and resume?
I love UI/UX and power of Photoscan but memory and speed is real problem.

Thank you.

[Vlad]

Well after testing ContextCaprute i see that in required HQ source for produce right results.
Agisoft Photoscan can produce good results from much lower quality, for example from 4K video taken by iPhone 6S.

Context Capture fast but faster failed.
Photoscan can align photos with different exposure/lightness/etc settings but slooooooow.

But damn, Photoscan Must work faster, and must be less memory hungry

[MeHoo]

I am very impressed with the results and documentation in that linked post, but did I miss where he posted the settings?  Just saying ultra high or high doesn't really capture all of the rest.. but still.. I care less about the time and more about the accuracy, and in many of those scans it seems the other software did a better job.. but those polycounts are too low for my liking.. the shark text it got on the carpe diem was night and day different.. I'd love to test that data set with my PSscan and see if I can;t achieve the same results with setttings I tweak.. regardless, Agisoft should be looking into these disparities...

EDIT: oh it seems Wishgranter got the data set.. did he ever post any results? He's a very active Photoscan user...

[Kiesel]

They have stopped distributing the free and basic editions of Smart3Dcapture in january 2015.
See also here: https://community.acute3d.com/continuing-free-basic/

[MeHoo]

Yeah I got that vibe, thanks for the link though.  Pretty clear that they have been acquired by a larger entity with many rules lol..

But.. results-wise.. I would love to heard Wishgranter's findings if he ever got that data set. 

[Kiesel]

Wishgranter was an very active member in this forum but nowadays is one of the admins of capturing reality, so I don't know if this is realy fair to Agisoft to ask him here.

But why not  contact Decamegas directly for the data set at

matthieu [dot] chevillot [at] laposte [dot] net

[Wishgranter]

Hi

Yes om Admin on RC forum + training customers for proper workflows for  photogrammetry and laser scanning data capture and processing + a bit in development of RC on features side

So in short there is NO  all around solution so there is no "universal solution"...

For the  Acute mess.. they blocked me out of their forums almost 2 year back, when have asked SIMPLE questions about AGI vs Acute result comparison dataset
My account is blocked and when try to register  they identify my IP ( name + email )  and BLOCK me out....

From my testing  Acute is "good" for aerial dataset, NOT so good for close range, small stuff, fullbody or  etc.. For the speed, from my testing its quite SLOW on my dual xeon PC + 2x Nvida cards....  But its quite interesting for really big datasets when you have a farm of computers.. but the  price... its quite expensive vs  performance... but yes it can process large dataset on  "ordinary" PC.
 

But regarding RealityCapture, its  approx 4-5 times faster as Acute.. +  Acute customers say RC have superior results regarding mesh quality in general so they switch to RC..
( even power users of Acute are slowly switching to RC   )





 

[Vlad]

Men, I test Bentley ContextCapture and with High (0.5px) precision it easily beat Agisoft Photoscan with the same Ultra-High (0.5px) quality.
Also if we compare dense clouds from the same dataset Photoscan is looks like blobby texture ContextCapture looks like clean solid mesh.
Also for ContextCapture no problem calculate 600,000,000 (600mln) dense cloud on 32Gb RAM (actually 300mln for one chank).
And speed is amasing.

[Vlad]

But, ContextCapture required too much manual Tie point placements, or it can not align not perfectly taken photos.
Photoscan make this part mostly automatically.