User Friendly 3D Scans and Photogrammetry (Mobile Apps)

Wow, the user friendliness and speed of this app is just amazing. A long way in ease and useability from the open source tool chain I've used previously.

NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis

This is really cool. The capture for the specular reflections is great. I'm excited that something like this could be really useful for better photogrammetry. For instance, see this old GBU I did a long time ago. The reflections off the shiny metal cause artifacts in the point cloud reconstruction.

There's a paper, a project summary page with more views, and a github project page for the code as well.

Drone Swarm Photogrammetry of the Matterhorn

senseFly mapped the Matterhorn with a bunch of little UAVs. Pretty impressive photogrammetric point cloud: 300 million points!

GBU-8 Photogrammetry

More photogrammetry. This uses the same software tool chain I described before. Still needs a bit of work on surface reconstruction. I always underestimate how many pictures are needed to get a reasonable point cloud: more is better.

I took the pictures of the GBU-8 at the NMUSAF. The surprising thing to me was the landing gear on the aircraft in the background showing up so well.

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.