Error in calculating volume on pix4d cloud

I have uploaded a project with GCP on the cloud. First of all no GCP is visible on the output.  Also while calculating it is giving  error in volume calculation.

Please help

My refernece is https://cloud.pix4d.com/pro/project/373526/3d

Thanks

SM

 

Thank you for your feedback.

Regarding the GCPs, at the moment there is no way to view them on the Cloud applications. We do plan to add this feature in the future but we still can’t provide information on when or how it will be implemented. How important would you consider this to be?

As for the volume calculations, they seem to be failing due to the large area of the volume being calculated and the very high resolution (low GSD) of the project. We are working on ways to make this better and will try to have some fixes in the coming days.

That being said, do you think it would be ok for you to calculate the volume on a lower resolution of the project (say 5m gsd instead of 1cm)? Calculating the volume using the full resolution available (as we do currently) gives you maximum precision at the expense of lots of data being transferred and lots of time being spent on computing the volume, which can lead to failures.

Dear Hugo,

I am under a Client assignment and I immediately need the the volumes.

There are 4 project each having 380-450 pictures with average 7 MB per picture. With my current configuration(Intel core i3 4005 CPU@ 1.7GHz , RAM 8 GB)  , I am undable to run  each project on the system as one of the project is still continuing from last night with only 1/3rd of the project being completed. Thats why I thought to use the cloud facility in order to execute it faster. 

As per your suggestion, how can i calculate on lower resolution on cloud.Can you help me to get me the volume by reprocessing same data on cloud. 

Is there a possibility where I download the current outcome of cloud to desktop and then try to find volume.?

Shall  we loose some precision in volumetric estimation (to what %) if we compute the same on 5 GSD instead of 1 GSD.  Can we try the same on desktop by reducing the resolution by 1/5 in the custom resolution in processing options. 

Prompt response shall be appreciated. 

Thanks

SM

 

 

 

 

Can downloading the high resolution output on desktop 

1 Like

On desktop you should be able to calculate everything at the full resolution because all the data is already there on the computer. On the cloud, we need to transfer quite a lot of data in order to calculate the volume and it can fail.

You can, however, download the results/outputs from the Cloud to your computer and perform the calculations using pix4Dmapper (if you are not processing the other project).

Regarding the loss in precision and down-sampling: we are still evaluating it but considering having an option for fast calculation of volumes and another for triggering the full precision calculations. Note, however, that calculating at a lower resolution will/would not require reprocessing the projects.

Please tell me the procedure where volume can be calculated online without re-processing of the project on cloud. 

Do i need to download the project on the same drive from where the data was kept. as it gave error in uploading the same. 

I am not still very clear with your answer for co-relation between lowering resolution and volumetric error.

Also , please tell me that if Pix4d (desktop version) can be dowloaded on amazon web service so that computing can be done easily. 

 

1 Like

@SANDESH MISHRA at the moment it is not possible to downsample on the cloud. It was more of a hypothetical question to help us decide on how to move forward with a fix and UI/UX improvement. But as I said before, you can just download the project from the cloud into your desktop computer and then use the Volumes feature of pix4Dmapper.

That being said, we are releasing a fix tomorrow which should let you calculate the volumes, even though they may take quite a while to compute. On some tests I ran on your project it took about 3-4 minutes to compute the volume. A further update (in the coming days) will provide faster results at the expense of some precision (or an option to trigger the full-precision calculation). On these tests I ran, reducing the GSD by a factor of 2 is moving the error from 0.48% to 0.98% while moving the computation time to 40 seconds.

Stay tuned for these fixes and more information!

@Susan Myers your work-around would indeed work. You can enable snapping by holding down the SHIFT key while drawing or editing the base surface. Control points should snap to other control points on the same annotation or on other annotations. This should work both in 2D and 3D. Thank you for the suggestion! We will try to be better and documenting these features.

Hi Sandesh, I was testing out the calculate volume on some of my projects. It worked on a 2 acre project area and then failed on a project with a 6 acre area, so I thought I would just create several smaller volumes to cover the 6 acres.  But the tool does not appear to allow you to snap the areas together, so many areas added together to cover a larger area would not be the most accurate.  I then discovered when I did make a smaller area within the project that had failed at 6 acres, each time I adjusted the area to be larger by adding more vertices and dragging it to cover a larger area, the volumes would recompute.  Finally, I had adjusted the base area to encompass the full 6 acres that had originally failed, and the calculated volumes updated accordingly. Even better, I deleted all of the volumes and tried again to draw one single volume area to compute the full volume. And now, it works.  

I don’t know how large your base area is, but I recommend you might give that a try.  Start with a small area and get it to calculate, make it larger and let it update the calculations, keep making it larger and recalculate, and so forth.  

Hi Hugo, 

I am still not able to calculate the volume on cloud. Do i need to re install pix4D to patch the fix? 

Kindly let me know the other steps which i have to do for enabling large calculation of Volume on my project. (Its okay for me if it is going to take 3-4 minutes.

Thanks

Sandesh Mishra

 

Hi Sandesh,

Could you give it a try using this url? https://tile-down-sampling.dev.cloud.pix4d.com/pro/project/373526/3d

We are still in the process of testing things out and have not yet been able to release the fix for all the users. We will try to release it to the normal cloud as quickly as possible, at which point the above URL will become invalid.

You also don’t need to install anything. Since we are talking about a Cloud platform, you should get all the latest features and fixes by refreshing the page. Once the fix is finally released, you should see it directly in https://cloud.pix4d.com