failing to calibrate a coastline scene

Hi all, hoping someone can give some tips with this. I have been struggling to calibrate a dataset of a coastline where around half of the images are over shallow sea. I need to keep the sea section in as we’re mapping a seagrass bed, so the loss of it makes the dataset worthless. I had struggled with this in other programs but an acquaintance had run the dataset in Pix4d fields and produced an orthomosaic which had most of the sea section in which convinced me to go ahead and buy Pix4dmatic as the description of Pix4dMatic sounded like it was the best option. I’ve read the documentation and tried to change scales and template (although primarily used ‘Flat scene low texture’) but none of it seems to be improving the area that can be calibrated.

I don’t understand why it’d work so easily in Pix4d fields yet seemingly be impossible in Pix4d matic so i’m hoping someone has some advice on this.

cheers, Peter

Pix4D Fields creates a lower quality ortho map. I would bet that Pix4Dreact would also work and also create a low quality orthomap.

Is the water moving (waves)?
If so I would not trust the outputs if they calibrated anyway.

I map beaches for costal erosion and all of the water sections are untrustworhty garbage. Moving waves, reflections and other water issues will affect any calibration. If you research this you can find some coastal studies over clear water had similar problems.

Sorry for the delay in replying to this. The water has small waves but no white water. We’d aimed for calm seas but not really an option most of the time!

Would there be a way to create a lower quality ortho map within pix4dmatic or the packages are just operating too differently?

The approaches are different, the one in react/fields is more about “stitching” whereas the one in matic (at this point in time) is based on a different approach. The stitching one is more adapted to this kind of projects. We may integrate that algorithm in PIX4Dmatic in the future to solve the kind of issues you are facing directly in PIX4Dmatic too.

That said, I’m not sure that “flat scene low texture” is the right way to go for a coastline in PIX4Dmatic, that’s usually more for flat surfaces in agriculture. Have the other templates not worked either?

In terms of kelp, I can confirm that someone else managed to do this with PIX4Dreact, you can read more here: Overwater mapping: the case of the disappearing kelp