Dayton Masonic Temple Photogrammetry

Bundler-PMVS2 Dense Point Cloud Visualization in Meshlab

I wanted to experiment with some free photogrammetry software, and the Masonic Temple in Dayton is a nice target of opportunity. There are some free (as in beer) options, but I wanted something that was free (as in freedom) that I could run on my own machines rather than in a software-as-a-service cloud. The basic work-flow is demonstrated in this post by Andrew Hazelden for some aerial photographs. He gets fairly impressive results using only free software.

The basic steps to turn a bunch of picture into a 3D model are

1. Run Bundler which estimates camera positions based on matching keypoints between pictures.
   I had to make some minor tweaks that are not documented on the main sites, but are out on the interwwebs: slight source code modification, add executable permissions
2. Run CVMS (in the case of a large number of pictures) which clusters views so that the dense reconstruction can be accomplished efficiently in parallel.
   
3. Run PVMS-2
4. Import the ply file created by pvms2 into meshlab
   
5. Calculate normals for the point cloud and run Poisson surface reconstruction; transfer point colors to the new mesh.
6. To Do: get the latest meshlab and try raster layer projection onto the mesh
   

I need more pictures with more overlapping to get better results; but this is promising.

Update: Now I need a little quad-copter to constrain things from angles I can't get from the ground.