I've used the BLK 360 before so some comment here. Essentially you scan at various points within the volume of interest, e.g. you walk around, place the scanner, scan, repeat. Each scan takes a few minutes at high angular resolution. Leica provides software called Register (or Cyclone) to match the scans together. Because you generally don't have GPS (the BLK doesn't have a GPS onboar and GPS is anyway much more inaccurate than the scan resolution - metres versus millimetres), the software has to do some kind of feature matching to stitch the scans. You get "links" between adjacent scanning points, and then you do a big optimisation pass to combine the scans.
This scan matching is by far the most difficult and time consuming bit. Probably OP had to manually align the scans as a first pass and then the software takes over using some algorithm like ICP (iterative closest point).
This is still only "internal" (i.e. scans are correct relative to each other, but you don't know where the full scan is) and you'd have to combine with an external reference point to geo-locate in the world. Doesn't really matter for this because you're just viewing the pyramid on its own, and you're not overlaying on a map. If you were, then usually what you have to do is take several ground control point (GCP) that are known with high accuracy and then reference that in the scan. You could geo-reference these using an RTK GPS or something, but it's quite difficult to get world coordinates at the millimetre scale and it rarely matters if you're that precise as long as the scan itself is consistent.
This video from Leica shows the full workflow for a typical use case (scanning a house with indoor and outdoor points). Note the point where they link inside and outside, around 16 mins in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV0LPKowOXU
Awesome, thanks for sharing. We use cyclone for 3D CMS scans of open holes at the mine I work at. Cool to see other use cases. Were you using 3DReshaper before the rebranding?
I had spent few weekends in my attempt to automate the process of generating 3D model from pictures. The underlying issue and concern folks have with matterport is their lock in. You are free to upload images to it but not allowed to self host or use their resource to generate the 3D dollhouse.
The regular way requires to feed the photo into multiple layer of software. Example, generate a point cloud, create a mesh from it, clean up the mesh and port it a Fanwood to be consumed (unity. Unreal, etc) this is all manual.
I am genuinely curious how the folks at matterport are able to do it with next to no human input after feeding it 2d pictures.
joshvm|3 years ago
This scan matching is by far the most difficult and time consuming bit. Probably OP had to manually align the scans as a first pass and then the software takes over using some algorithm like ICP (iterative closest point).
This is still only "internal" (i.e. scans are correct relative to each other, but you don't know where the full scan is) and you'd have to combine with an external reference point to geo-locate in the world. Doesn't really matter for this because you're just viewing the pyramid on its own, and you're not overlaying on a map. If you were, then usually what you have to do is take several ground control point (GCP) that are known with high accuracy and then reference that in the scan. You could geo-reference these using an RTK GPS or something, but it's quite difficult to get world coordinates at the millimetre scale and it rarely matters if you're that precise as long as the scan itself is consistent.
This video from Leica shows the full workflow for a typical use case (scanning a house with indoor and outdoor points). Note the point where they link inside and outside, around 16 mins in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV0LPKowOXU
loufe|3 years ago
bambax|3 years ago
lukehollis|3 years ago
Similar except I captured with Matterport Capture and then downloaded and aligned data captured with BLK after in Cyclone so that we'd have both sets.
mattfrommars|3 years ago
The regular way requires to feed the photo into multiple layer of software. Example, generate a point cloud, create a mesh from it, clean up the mesh and port it a Fanwood to be consumed (unity. Unreal, etc) this is all manual.
I am genuinely curious how the folks at matterport are able to do it with next to no human input after feeding it 2d pictures.