No calibrated cameras on my project (monument surrounded by water)

PIX4Dmapper PIX4Dmapper Questions/Troubleshooting
1

Hi all,

I’m new to the pix4d world and I’m trying to get a 1st mesh of a simple monument close to where I live.

I’m using a Bebop 2 with the iPad app to create the plan to capture the images.

Here is a thumbnail of a typical image taken by the drone when he did the mission. The original image size is 4096x3320 pixels.

After drag’n dropping the images into the PC application and starting the process, I obtain an error message saying No calibrated cameras.

I have checked the pix4d help files and it is very difficult to understand what’s wrong. A few things are sure though, the device (bebop 2) is recognized and set correctly into the image properties.

When having a look at the quality report and the icons, I see a red exclamation markin front of the dataset (57 images even though I haven’t decided how many pictures to take) and in front of Camera Optimization (it says not available simply).

Is it because the model I’m trying to get the 3D model of isn’t big enough into my pictures (so I should redo the path with a smaller radius) ?

Any opinion, idea will be welcome.

Regards

2

I am no expert and I’m relatively new to the Pix4D world as well but Pix4D requires ‘interesting’ subject matter in your photos in order to be able to detect keypoints and make matches between images.  In your example, you have nearly all sky and water, both of which Pix4D will not be able to detect these keypoints required.  I would suggest flying much closer to your subject so that it encompasses most of your image and elliminate as much of the sky and water in your images as possible.  The software will make these keypoint matches much more efficiently and produce a better result.  The Pix4D webinar series is excellent at describing how to set up and process your projects.

3

Hello Eric,

The red exclamation mark in the dataset field indicates a problem with either the type of terrain or the image acquisition process or the project setup.

In the image above, a lot of water is captured. Water surfaces do not contain the needed visual content for processing and can bring problems in the image calibration. In any case you should always verify that the images quality is sufficient, the images are not blurry, they have enough content and sufficient resolution. Additionally, you should make sure that there is adequate overlap between the images. To do this you can open the images and visually inspect the overlap.

For the reconstruction of objects like this monument for which you perform a circular mission we recommend flying closer to the structure, turning several times around the structure at several heights, taking images with high overlap both in the same height and between different heights and setting the camera angle so that it points to the ground.

Regards,