Point cloud selection bug

Hi Everyone,

I often use the point cloud editing tool to remove noisy area or improve the classification. I noticed several times that the selection tool, at some point, start to ignore points even if they are in my polygonal selection.

You can see on the picture that some point cannot be selected, even if i change my angle or if i repeat the selection on this area. If i try to select points on other areas of my project i will also have this issue. Stop the edition of the point cloud or load/unload the point cloud layer does not solve the problem. The only way to be able to select those point is to close Pix4D Mapper and reopen the project. And then, after some time editing the point cloud, I will have the same issue, I will have to restart the software… it is really annoying.

I’m running Pix4D Mapper 4.5.6, but i already had this issue on previous versions and with multiple different projects. I have the feeling that using the clipping box make this problem occur more frequently, but i am not sure.

I was wondering if the pix4d team already had reports from other users about this.

I also noticed few things :

  • Opening/closing the right panel when editing the point cloud can cause the cursor to be displaced from its real position on the ray cloud, of a distance corresponding to the panel width.
  • When exporting the mesh with a right click on the left panel, when the export is finish and you get asked if you want to open the export folder, it lead you to the pix4d mapper project files everytime (and not to the folder you chose to export)

Thank you,

Capture pb point cloud 1

Hi @DRONE_ALSACE,

Thank you for your feedback.

So far nobody in such a detail reported us problems you’re experiencing. I only could reproduce the issue with the 3D Textured Mesh export. And, about that, I’ll notify our developers right away. For the rest of the problems, I would be interested in other people’s opinion. The more insights we have, the better we can understand and solve the problem. However, would you mind performing an additional test on another computer to verify whether to software behaves the same with the same project but on different machines? I’d appreciate your help. Thank you in advance.

Hi, thank you for your answer.

This point selection problem is a little random, it often occur after some time spent editing the point cloud. I only have one computer dedicated to pix4D mapper at work so i don’t think i’ll be able to perform tests on other machines. But if I ever get the chance, I’ll let you know.

I also have this problem very often. It’s very annoying as there is no solution for this.

The problem seems to be associated with some resolution/memory bug. And it does seem to happen mostly when we move the clipping box.

Notice at the top of the picture that the point density is very low. That is not the true density of that area, it should be equal to the rest of the cloud. At the moment I see the first bad density region in the cloud, I know the following selections will be damaged.

Rotating and zooming may fix that “display” issue, but the affected regions will STILL have the “selection” problem. (Notice the selected region in red. It’s correctly displayed, but the selection seems to consider only the points that would be displayed when the region is “bad” like the top region)

I have Pix4D 4.5.6, and I believe I had this with 4.3.x in a different machine as well.

Found a solution

Hey @DRONE_ALSACE and @Beata.
I found a workaround for this bug.

If you click “point groups” on the left to “turn it off” completely, and then turn it on again, the cloud will be restored to full resolution and further selections will work well.

image

Hi @Daniel_Moller, thank you for this workaround ! I’ll try this the next time i get the issue.

Thank you. This solution worked! This weird point cloud selection problem has been EXTREMELY annoying as I’m cleaning up a lot of noise from my 15-mi corridor mission. Pix4D, please look into this problem. In the meantime, Daniel’s solution works great.

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Thank you, Daniel!!!
This will save me a lot of time! I was really struggling with that point selection tool.