I need to scan a house
polycounter lvl 14
Do you have any tip to make a photogrammetry scan of my house with my phone ? I need to use that environment for a digital twin and I would like to be precisely spatially referenced but I do not have all the expensive cameras and stuff...
If you have any tips for free solutions to process data and the best quickest and easiest way to do this would be great :) .
Replies
you need to, or you want to?
what kind of quality level do you expect to match? because unless you have some serious equipment at hand, my experience is, this will all just look like a mush.
My experience with iphone was so-so. While It can do photogrammetry for sure but you have to take gazillion of photos close to subject. End even this way it tends to shit evry photo with AI details that are not there actually + some crazy sharpening altogether resulting in a lot of geometry artifacts and noise.
I suggest to buy a cheap used mirror less camera like sony a5000 or a6000 on ebay . It's also pretty low res and would require lots of pictures shot but way, way more details per same amount of pixels and better photogrammetry results than with iphone in my experience. Maybe there are better phone cameras but I doubt it.
if you have to use your phone shoot at sun light and deal with shadows later. In cloudy light a phone wouldn't be able to do anything nice really. Aggressive noise killing AI usually makes it useless for photogrammetry which needs honest true small details in pixels . Time of Flight or IR sensors in phones that makes depth scan are too low res and also useless.
Save pictures as DNG . There are many cheap apps like Camera+ that allow this . That way you could kill excessive sharpening at least .
Photogrammetry of anything building size is really hard to do without a drone, simply because you can't get all angles from the ground. You might be able to get a starting point and rough dimensions, but there will be a lot of clean up and manual modelling. Its also not ideal for precision in 3D space, since all its calculations are relative to itself. What you would probably need to do is to get positioning from Google Earth/Maps, and align your photogrammetry to that.
If its a personal project, I say go for it with whatever tools you have; you'll learn something about photogrammetry at least. If its a professional job, you probably want to rent the appropriate gear and/or subcontract to someone.
I got reasonable - And by that I mean good enough to model round but not good enough to use - results using a realsense IR depth camera to scan various big stuff like rooms.
Assuming you can still buy one (or the lidar equivalent) you could probably get it done for under £500 including software.
Could you post a few of those 'reasonable' color/depth pairs please from a realsense camera. Google finds only something super low res and they doesn't have anything persuading on their website either .
If the lighting conditions are good and you have a phone with a decent sensor (doesn't need to be top tier) that can save RAW you probably can just use it as long as you don't need super high precision or insane amounts of detail. For processing I use Meshroom even though it's quite inferior to RealityCapture it's Open Source and free and the results are good enough for my hobby level scans.
Here is an example of a scan I did: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/bertone-classic-rims-raw-scan-free-download-e4cb8b1f8779461093b92f5a15a5012e
It was a bit rushed and taken with a Pixel 3a, but I think it illustrates what you can achieve with a phone fairly well. It's not perfect by any means, but if you exclude the glossy metallic wheel from it it has a decent quality IMO.
not without capturing it all again i'm afraid - I wasn't willing to pay for the software so couldn't save any of the results. I got the realsense for motion detection etc. so was focusing on that rather than scanning
it was on par with using standard photogrammetry methods and a phone to capture something large like a room, you just got the results pretty much immediately. it wouldn't be suitable for close up work but would make sense for doing something like a room or an alleyway
Thankyou for the comments! Its for a thesis project but photogrammetry is not the focus ... slso I forgot to mention I just need to scan interiors not the exteriors.
Hardware for scanning interiors exists.
It costs a lot to buy the gear so people usually pay someone to come and do it for them.
If you Google you will find a number of companies that offer scanning services - some of whom will probably be willing to explain to you what they do and tell you about the equipment they use.
Get out a measuring tape and start modeling. Replicate real life surfaces in substance designer. 0 photography required.
Yes, this, exactly. It's mostly straight edges! No reason to not just measure and model.
I was just showing this app to a friend. Works reasonably with an Android phone, to make a blobby reference mesh, that you can import into a DCC modeling tool, and model over the top of.