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Author Topic: importing cameras  (Read 16928 times)

Kjellis85

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importing cameras
« on: February 07, 2012, 12:18:50 PM »
I have a project that didn't really work in photoscan. Ran it through microsoft photosynth and got a slightly better result. But I only got a pointcloud and need to mesh it, but using meshlab didn't work that well so I figured I'd import it to photoscan and do it there. The question is how do I do this? I tried importing only the pointcloud but it didn't work so I tried importing the camera positions. The problem was that the camera positions gained from photosynth are in .csv, not .out or .xml. How can I use the csv file with photoscan?

Alexey Pasumansky

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Re: importing cameras
« Reply #1 on: February 07, 2012, 12:49:03 PM »
Hello Kjellis,

Could you please send us and example of PhotoSynth .csv file. Maybe we'll be able to implement support for such format.

Also there is an Google Chrome extension that allows to save camera positions from PhotoSynth in bundle.out format, but I haven't checked yet if it works fine. Here is a link to author's  page:  http://www.visual-experiments.com/2012/02/01/photosynth-bundle-out-export/#comments
Best regards,
Alexey Pasumansky,
Agisoft LLC

Kjellis85

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Re: importing cameras
« Reply #2 on: February 07, 2012, 01:10:34 PM »
Hello Kjellis,

Could you please send us and example of PhotoSynth .csv file. Maybe we'll be able to implement support for such format.

Yes, I'll send you a .csv file.

Also there is an Google Chrome extension that allows to save camera positions from PhotoSynth in bundle.out format, but I haven't checked yet if it works fine. Here is a link to author's  page:  http://www.visual-experiments.com/2012/02/01/photosynth-bundle-out-export/#comments

I have tried it in between these messages :) But something is buggy at my end, because I cannot download the bundle out file, nor see the points. But I have someone looking at it right now. I'll let you know if it works.

Alexey Pasumansky

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Re: importing cameras
« Reply #3 on: February 07, 2012, 01:24:59 PM »
You can send .csv to support@agisoft.ru
Best regards,
Alexey Pasumansky,
Agisoft LLC

Paulov

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Re: importing cameras
« Reply #4 on: February 17, 2012, 01:17:22 AM »
Hi, same issue here. With small scenes photoscan perfoms awesome, and the textured model looks awesome. But for larger stuff it gets easilly messed up with the photomatching.

From my experience (hobbyst) photosynth has one of the best and fastest photomatching. Having the optionto swap the on app photomatching by importing photosynth scene would be cool.

So far, this very recently released Chrome extension exports bundle.out file of your synth

http://www.visual-experiments.com/2012/02/01/photosynth-bundle-out-export/


I tried it yeterday but I believe I got an error when importing. I dont have now internet in my big pc so cant retest.

Also tried to import a bundle.out file of a simple sample scene and even if I managed to import and to see an sparse point cloud wich loked planar, after the dialog that asks me to set the accuracy etc I got nothing. This bundle.out file was build with sfmToolkit.

While I'm writing this, I'm testing the new demo 8.5 wich yes it feels much faster, but as it still take a while to compute cant say if its working in nonworking scene, but wated to share this synth to .out exporter info.

« Last Edit: February 17, 2012, 01:19:26 AM by Paulov »

Kjellis85

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Re: importing cameras
« Reply #5 on: February 17, 2012, 12:26:02 PM »
I have tested the chrome extention and it works great. The .out file works very well with photoscan, but i am not sure if it outperforms or even performs as good as photoscan. To do that would require extensive testing, which I don't have the time to do.

Paulov

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Re: importing cameras
« Reply #6 on: February 17, 2012, 04:11:38 PM »
This is very good news then. If it imports the cameras from photosynth the ressults will for sure be much better than with the standard photoscan synth, as many time it fails with the camera positioning and at leas this step is nicely done. Also photosynth will be faster if you have a nice internet connection.

I managed also tu build a .out file using sfmtoolkit wich does not need internet. It is based heavily in GPU and in my case it is VERY fast.  Also noticed runing hte demo that even if open cl was active and one of the cores was disabled as recomended, the 4 cores where working equally.
Also, my GPU when working does a very particular sound wich I did not heard.

What I noticed when importing the cameras is that the point cloud construction was BOOSTED a lot.


My GPU is a Gainward GTX 560ti with 2gb.>>> Any one else have a similar GPU??
« Last Edit: February 17, 2012, 11:34:02 PM by Paulov »

Paulov

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Re: importing cameras
« Reply #7 on: February 17, 2012, 11:35:56 PM »
Hi. Yess!! With the Chrome plugin I did mention you can actually import your cameras and the sparse point cloud via .out importer!!! Nice!!!

I'm testing now an scene that got mad by matching in Photoscan. Lets see what kind of mesh and texture it generates now.

thesystemera

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Re: importing cameras
« Reply #8 on: June 08, 2014, 04:37:17 PM »
Is there any update on Photoscan being able to import .csv files.

I'm having real issues with PhotoScan not aligning camera's correctly, however, Photosynth seems to be doing a good job.

I can't seem to get the Chrome plugin to work, however I am able to export a .csv file from the synthexport prgram. If any one could talk me through an effective workflow, that would be appreciated.

Thank you.
Simon Che de Boer @ http://www.realityvirtual.co/

ozbigben

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Re: importing cameras
« Reply #9 on: June 09, 2014, 09:24:58 AM »
Are we talking the old photosynth or the preview version. There are a few differences in the available data with the preview. CSV I get using SynthExport (http://synthexport.codeplex.com/) contains these fields:
ImageId, PositionX, PositionY, PositionZ, RotationX, RotationY, RotationZ, AspectRatio, FocalLength, RadialDistortionK1, RadialDistortionK2
0, -0.0073282, -0.0138619, 0.0106463, -0.0236492572237913, -0.00460469355218319, 1.46217268368253, 0.666667, 17.971, -4.11466E-05, 4.11466E-05


Not sure if other plugins/sources that people are using get the same data, but there are some significant differences in what is available with the preview version of photosynth (corrected images only , point cloud and no camera export) This would make it far less useful for people who are using it to reprocess their own data.

It would be interesting to know what results people got.  I'm uploading one now as a comparison. I've had a closer look at a synth by someone else and it's all pretty weird for a good looking mesh.  There are pairs/triples of images that look almost identical but the images have (in some cases) very different focal lengths in the camera export. Given that each image has its own lens settings it may not be that practical to import them into Photoscan
« Last Edit: June 09, 2014, 12:48:25 PM by ozbigben »

ozbigben

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Re: importing cameras
« Reply #10 on: June 09, 2014, 03:28:19 PM »
Well that was interesting   ???
http://photosynth.net/edit.aspx?cid=891ba374-f8c3-4d5a-bd0c-14bc8c362b05
Uploaded 121 images (every 1/3rd image of a set), 118 were aligned.
5 point clouds were created using various combinations of the images for a total of 199 cameras (114,41,28,14,2).
Every camera has a unique position and focal length/distortion parameters, despite the fact that there are 81 duplicate references to images. I downloaded a few images and they were the same as the original. I suspect in the other download I did I got corrected images which would explain the duplicates with slight distortion differences. I'm not too sure how much value you'd get from importing just the camera positions from the largest point cloud in a synth given that there appears to be a lot of distortion optimisation going on to make the points fit.