Photoscan on MAC and LINUX/UNIX?

[jan]

Hi,

is it possible to run photoscan on MAC or LINUX,

we have some (very) powerfull computers here on the university,
but they only have MAC or LINUX/UNIX as OS.

We have a MAC PRO octocore with 18GB of RAM, and the calculation centre has a supercomputer which runs on LINUX

I know the executable is only for Windows, but maybe there is a trick?

I love the program, but I need to process a lot of pictures

regards,
Jan  

[Dmitry Semyonov]

Hello Jan,

We are planning to release Mac and Linux/Unix versions of PhotoScan in the future, but we haven't started working on them yet. So I don't think they will be available in the next 2 months.

We will let you know when more information on these versions is available.

Currently you can try running PhotoScan in some virtualization software like VirtualBox or Wine. Unfortunately, we have no information about working configurations of these sort, so you'll have to experiment yourself.

I don't see any reasons preventing PhotoScan from execution in virtual environment, except the OpenCL engine which may be tricky to configure. So it should be possible to run PhotoScan in virtual environment, at least with disabled OpenCL acceleration.

Please post here if you'll get any results.

With best regards,
Dmitry Semyonov
AgiSoft LLC

[Matt]

Hi Dmitry,

Just wondering how much progress has been made with the Linux Version of Photoscan. I am running out of memory on a 64 bit windows 7 machine with 24 gb of RAM but have a Linux machine with 156 gb or RAM at my disposal.

Thanks

[Dmitry Semyonov]

Hello Matt,

It's very interesting, what's the size of the photo set that you can't process on a 24GB machine? We are mainly working on the 24GB system also, and never ran out of memory.

Regarding the Unix/Linux support, we have already added Mac OS X support, but Linux support is scheduled for a bit later time. Unfortunately, separate PhotoScan distributions are required for each Linux clone, so maintaining them will be quite time consuming.

What Linux distribution are you running? Probably we can prepare a PhotoScan distribution for it.

With best regards,
Dmitry Semyonov
AgiSoft LLC

[Matt]

Hi Dmitry,

My issue isn't with processing one photo its with trying to write out the full resolution geometry extracted from a 30 photo mosaic. Individual photos are @ 10000 by 10000 pixels.  The machine seems to be able to process the geometry but fails when it comes time to write it to file.

In terms of Linux. The specs for the machine we are using for our point cloud extraction project is outlined below.

Dell Poweredge
Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick 64-bit
Kernel 2.6.35-28-server
GNOME 2.32.0
RAM: 256 GB
4 * AMD Opteron 6128 (=32 cores)

Many Thanks

Matt

[Matt]

Hi Dmitry,

Just wondering how you are going with the Linux version for us to try out. We are keen to see if we can run our photos through photoscan at full resolution and highest quality extraction.

Many Thanks

Matt

[Wishgranter]

it could bne a file size limitation 2 GB ?? try google for that...
and why not use a extra WIN 7 64bit HDD for that monster ? as a external boot maybe ?

[Matt]

It doesnt appear to be a file size limitation on my Windows 64 Bit system as I am able to export large files ie. a 5 gb .obj file. My issue is maxing out my 24 GB of RAM on my personal workstation due to the size of the point clouds I am generating.

The research team are keen to run a calibration of Photoscan derived point cloud on the Linux monster. They are validating photoscan point cloud against two Lidar datasets. One was obtained at the same time as the Photos from the same platform and one was flown from another survey plane.

They want to compare Photoscan against some automated Bundler/PMVS2 code they have written that extracts the cloud and automates the extraction of colored markers (control points) and uses them for the helmert transformation.

[Dmitry Semyonov]

Hello Matt,

We have assembled a PhotoScan distribution for Debian/Ubuntu 64 bit that you can try (available from the PhotoScan downloads page). It is not yet packaged in the .deb package, just a plain .tar.gz archive.

To run the program unpack the .tar.gz file and run photoscan.sh script from the application folder.

Please let me know if there are any missing dependencies or any other problems with it.

With best regards,
Dmitry Semyonov
AgiSoft LLC

[KEgg]

Hi Dmitry,

I've been using AGI photoscan Linux edition on Ubuntu 10.10 64bit for the past couple of days. Really pleased to see it has come to Linux as Im more of a Linux person than windows now.

Anyway, looks like I've hit a couple of problems. The first is a minor one and that's when saving a file, it does not included the '.psz' extension. Meaning I have to rename the file with its extension or rely on the previously opened list.

Next is that I seem to be getting a 'segmentation fault' occurring when saving a large file. These files include reconstructed chunks with masking information. Sometimes this occurs when loading/Appending a file too. When running photoscan from within a Terminal, I can't see any relevant information as to why it crashes, except 'segmentation fault'. Is there a debug mode that can be used so I can report back with more helpful information?

Lastly I've also noticed that within the preferences panel/OpenCL tab, my Nvidia card does not seem to be showing up. I have Cuda Toolkit installed and Ubuntu 10.10, if using the most current driver, has OpenCL up and running natively.

Would like to help more if possible. Been a long term user of various scan technologies, and have been involved with stereo lithography  for numerous years now. 

best regards

MikeH
TD@KineticShell

[Dmitry Semyonov]

Hello Mike,

Thank you for detailed report.

The file extension is appended automatically on Windows and Mac OS X, but on Linux the default behavior is different. We will try to fix it over time.

We are now working on a crash reporting system for the Linux version. It will be included in the next update and will automatically generate crash reports. I hope that it will be available this weekend.

The OpenCL support in the Linux version was not tested much yet, we are working on it also. But I don't think that it will be ready this weekend.

Please post here if there are any more problems with the Linux version.

With best regards,
Dmitry Semyonov
AgiSoft LLC

[KEgg]

Hi Dmitry,

Cheers for the quick response.

How might I know when there is a new version to download? Just noticed when using the software to check for an upgrade it comes up telling me the version installed is 0.8.1.841 and the latest available is 0.8.0.794.

I'm currently running various tests to see when the 'segmentation fault' is occurring. At present it seems to be random when starting a fresh project, so i can get through masking and save, but when reconstructing a large chunk seems to make it crash on saving. Fault occurs all the time when saving from a loaded session.

kind regards

Mike

[KEgg]

Excellent work on fixing the issues I pointed out with the Linux version. Have taken the same project I was working on, and have been able reconstruct save and export without a single issue. Great to see OpenCL all working. It could be my imagination, but it really seems quicker under Linux than Windows. Will compare and contrast later.

There is one thing I'd like to see as a feature in Photoscan, and thats the ability to set the axis correctly. Most of my the photos i use within photoscan are taken portrait style, and it seems to set the Y axis, pointing down, as up automatically. Would love the ability to be able to set/change the axis direction, either when starting out the project, say after importing photo data, or on final export to chosen format. I would prefer to set after photo data import/photo align.

Once again excellent work at updating Photoscan so quickly.

with respect,

MikeH