Mason's Court - Stratford Upon Avon - 3D scan comparisons

A few interesting Photogramettry comparisons between various free software:

VisualSFM - http://ccwu.me/vsfm/

Meshlab - http://www.meshlab.net/

Meshroom - https://alicevision.github.io/

123DCatch - Autodesk (discontinued)

The subject is an amazing grade 2 listed building in Stratford Upon Avon, called Mason's Court.

Camera was a Canon 600D, lens was an aspherical 18mm (can't remember the brand, possibly Tokina??)

100+ images, ideal lighting conditions, nice and overcast!

Structure from motion comparisons, from left to right:

1. Meshroom default settings

2. Meshroom ultra settings

3. VisualSFM

 

Structure from motion perspective 2:

 

Structure from motion perspective chimney:

Dense reconstruction (VisualSfm only)

Mesh results:

1. Meshroom default settings

2. Meshroom ultra settings

3. VisualSFM

4. 123D Catch

 

 

Mesh results perspective 2:

 

 

Mesh results chimney:

 

 

Conclusions:

Clearly all three software use different algorithms, as the results vary greatly between all solutions, and in this case my personal preference was VisualSFM plus meshlab, however I tried Meshroom on another scan and far surpassed VisualSFM, so there's obvious strengths and weaknesses to both and I'd say it's worth trying both on any scan and see which comes out best.

Meshroom Ultra settings took around 24h to process in one sitting, set and forget, very easy and convenient to get good results, whereas MeshLab needed a few tries to get a good meshing.

Also worth noting Meshroom results were improved by setting all camera intrinsicts to have an initial focal length of -1.

The output of 123Dcatch was almost usable as is, but lacking a lot of detail, the other would need a lot of cleanup to get to the point where I would say the scans are usable. On that point VisualSFM and MeshLab do provide a great set of tools for cleaning up point data and meshes.