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OpenDroneMap

opendronemap.org

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Re: OpenDroneMap

#21

Post by pierotofy »

mch82 wrote: post #10

What motivated the choice of AGPL license? OpenDroneMap has dependencies on GDAL, Proj4J, GeoPackage, SciPy, Python, Nginx, and Django, among other packages. Those foundational libraries tend to have more permissive licenses (PSF, MIT, BSD 3-Clause, Apache 2.0 etc.).

OpenDroneMap co-founder here: to make sure modifications to the software continue to be released as open source to end users. Other licenses allow companies to just take the software, modify it to their needs and not release those changes back. ODM is very suited for use in cloud environments, so the AGPL works very well here.

Re: OpenDroneMap

#23

Post by pierotofy »

smallerfish wrote: post #5

Cool idea, which I've wanted to exist (so I'm glad it does). I have two suggestions for improving the site: 1) The huge list of software in the ecosystem is overwhelming. Bury it. The choice of picking the two alternative ways of running it at the top is fine, but that's all the front page should have to say about software. 2) Critically, on the front page you need a quick demo or diagram showing how you get data int…

These are great suggestions, thanks! I'll see if we can make some improvements.

Re: OpenDroneMap

#24

Post by carbadtraingood »

dsmmcken wrote: post #17

I found it neat that it really can make use of all the cpu and memory you can throw at it. I used it to stich around 1000 photos, and watched as it maxed my 32 cores and 64gb ram in my workstation for hours. I wanted to annotate a map of my property to keep track of the fruit trees I am planting. Google maps resolution for the area is extremely low, but a basic DJI drone, pix4d capture (free for capture) and ODM can…

It's great, but several times it does fall back to single threaded performance. I regularly use it to generate photos of hundreds of acres, and I end up needing a machine with more RAM and less CPU.

Re: OpenDroneMap

#25

Post by abstract_put »

Without any idea how to do anything, I was able to use the cheapest DJI drone (Mini 2) and ODM to stitch together a giant orthophoto of my parent's maple sugar bush. It overlays extremely nicely over Google Maps without any ground control points. The resolution is such that one can pick out individual buckets on each tree.

This is _very_ cool software and I've started making maps of my own property every ~month or so just to see how things change. I started by manually flying missions and eyeballing where to take photos, and everything worked great. I see other mentions here that say the "capture" part can be done for free by PIX4D, I ended up paying for Dronelink to do the same thing.

It's much nicer to have a consistent mission so things always come out the same, and way more efficient to have the software handle where to take the photos. Having the overlap in both directions taken care of is very nice. Now I just sit back and make sure nothing crazy happens (e.g. strong winds) and swap the battery out when it dies before resuming the mission. SO neat!

Re: OpenDroneMap

#26

Post by pierotofy »

laen wrote: post #6

I've been trying to get my organization to use ODM, but finding it difficult. The problem is analogous to the issues that Gimp has to Photoshop or Linux to Windows -- ease of use. Additionally, even if you properly configure the software the quality still is not comparable to the big proprietary players in the photogrammetry field: Bentley Systems; Pix4D; Drone Deploy. A major reason for the quality issues is that th…

Thanks for championing ODM! :) It's true that proprietary systems have had a lead in development for a long time, but especially of late the software has gotten really good. If you haven't tried the software in a while, I'd recommend updating and giving it another try.

The quality issue is an interesting one; I remember having a discussion with a client that was considering transitioning away from Bentley's ContextCapture (CC) and they mentioned that CC was generating much denser point clouds compared to ODM. CC tends to generate very good looking point cloud models, except its algorithms extract points from a mesh interpolation approach, so sometimes you end up with points where geometrically there shouldn't be any. Sure they look good, but is that "good" quality?

Re: OpenDroneMap

#27

Post by pierotofy »

jarofgreen wrote: post #7

By coincidence I tried this last week; it really is pretty impressive. The one thing I missed is some intros/guidance on how best to take photos to feed it; which angle, how much spacing, any tools to use in flight etc. I got pretty good results with my first run but was going to blindly experiment to see if I could improve it. Any tips?

https://docs.opendronemap.org/flying/

We might need to put this page in a more visible place.

Re: OpenDroneMap

#28

Post by pierotofy »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #19
terramars wrote: post #16

i highly highly recommend trying Colmap if you like ODM. it's not suitable for drone footage by itself (it works but why), but it has amazing performance for just handheld video walkthroughs or if you have a lot of geotagged photos. basically the next generation / natural extension of the original Bundler that brought open source unstructured SfM to the mainstream. not photo realistic or anything but very usable for…

Colmap is pretty amazing. It takes about 6-10x longer to run when you max everything out, but it does things no other software has managed to do for me. That said, I made our drone photogrammetry pipeline with ODM and I wouldn't use colmap. There's still some annoying things that no software can seem to do: with a single camera, I'd love to create a 3D map of a road. But no matter how much overlap of photos I get, (I…

I can chime in on the road: there's probably insufficient color variation and that gets filtered out during patch-match. You can relax the NCC Threshold parameter and you should be able to reconstruct the road (you'll also get more outliers in other areas though). There might be an option in COLMAP to do that. In ODM you need to modify the fNCCThresholdKeep parameter in OpenMVS (you'll need to recompile OpenMVS).

Re: OpenDroneMap

#29

Post by carbadtraingood »

I use ODM to map large areas (100-300) acres regularly. It's pretty much fire and forget on AWS spot instances.

Combined with Dronelink, my workflow is largely automated. Just a few more pieces I'd need to have in place to be able have it be more or less hands off.

The next piece I want to tackle is creating a watched directory or S3 bucket that automatically spins up a spot instance, monitors for the completeness of the work, downloads the results to S3, and shuts down the spot instance. Then all I'd have to do is watch the drone fly and move photos into a folder.

Re: OpenDroneMap

#30

Post by pierotofy »

carbadtraingood wrote: post #24
dsmmcken wrote: post #17

I found it neat that it really can make use of all the cpu and memory you can throw at it. I used it to stich around 1000 photos, and watched as it maxed my 32 cores and 64gb ram in my workstation for hours. I wanted to annotate a map of my property to keep track of the fruit trees I am planting. Google maps resolution for the area is extremely low, but a basic DJI drone, pix4d capture (free for capture) and ODM can…

It's great, but several times it does fall back to single threaded performance. I regularly use it to generate photos of hundreds of acres, and I end up needing a machine with more RAM and less CPU.

Yep, RAM is usually the bottleneck for processing larger datasets. We do have a divide-and-conquer approach to push the limits of your hardware though: https://docs.opendronemap.org/large/
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