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Photogrammetry on Cloud using Photoscan

Raminder SinghResearch Data Services

Research Technologies, Indiana UniversityMay 18, 2016

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Agisoft’s Photoscan

• Photoscan is a professional-level GUI based tool to process a collection of images into dense point clouds as well as textured meshes.

• It has a batch mode, but the processing stages must be entered by hand using the GUI for each collection to be processed.

• The dense point cloud generation stage can take advantage of GPU hardware.

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Photoscan’s Pros and Cons

Pros– Usually higher-quality output (more points, less fringing)– Batch queue allows the entire workflow to be specified at the beginning– Some stages will take advantage of GPU processors

Cons– GUI interface requires manual intervention (minimally to setup a batch)

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Data Sets

• Doll: 61 images, 14 Mpix each, Size: 350MB. http://www.agisoft.com/downloads/sample-data/

• IU Venus: 80 images. 24 Mpix each, Size: 500MB

• Niobid F3 statue from Bernie Frischer: 151 images. 24 Mpix each, Size: 2.08 GB

(with 8 cores – 1 GPU node NVIDIA drive - Processed in ~9 hours )

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Microsoft Azure Configurations and Costing (~ $100 per core/per month)

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Azure: Comparison Charts for CPU and Memory

2 cores - 90 mins 4 cores - 50 mins 8 cores - 30 mins

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Azure: CPU, Memory and File I/O with 2 cores

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Azure: CPU, Memory and File I/O with 2 cores

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Azure: CPU, Memory and File I/O with 2 cores

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Azure: CPU, Memory and File I/O with 4 cores

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Azure: CPU, Memory and File I/O with 8 cores

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Monthly Sponsorship Statement for period 4/1/2016 through 4/30/2016

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Conclusion with Azure• Observations on PhotoScan:

– Photoscan is CPU intensive, memory does not matter, 14GB was good enough.– Batch mode works but its best to stop after photo alignment for selection of area for better

results.– Sketchfab link: https://skfb.ly/NOzL

• Using premium storage is expensive and we need to know when its required.• No GPU nodes.

– Availability announced in Sep 2015.– Prerelease version is not available.

• Issue on monitoring and accounting:– Its hard to create reports and customize dashboards on Azure.– We are not able to get to daily account information based on usage.

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AWS Configurations and Costing

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AWS: Comparison Charts for Instance Hours

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AWS: Comparison Charts for Instance Costs

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Timing and Dense point cloud results by Bill Sherman

  Pixels VisualSFM PhotoScan

Niobid Quarter 0.22GP (147x1004x1504) ___ / 0.36M 695m / 3.5M

Niobid Half 0.89GP (148x2008x3008) 910m / 1.2M ~2460 / 14.5M

Niobid Full 3.58GP (148x4016x6016) ~140m / 5.2M (*) ~7200m / 45.0M

HummingBird 0.13GP (26x2500x2000) 18.5m / 0.50M ___ / 0.65M

ClockAtArb 4.35GP (207x5616x3744) 310m / 3.4M 77m / 4.8M

(*) Run by Chris Eller on ADAM-1 workstation at 16 core and GPUs * Niobid Full was also run by Tassie Gniady on Momento. Process time (including mesh creation) was approximately 180m. Mesh has obvious issues with the intricacies of the hand (see screenshot below).