To disable or not to disable (cameras when you have multiple blocks)?

PIX4Dmapper PIX4Dmapper Questions/Troubleshooting
1

What is the prevailing wisdom on disabling cameras when you have multiple blocks that you can’t resolve?

I do a lot of oblique free-flight surveys of river banks and find the issue with multiple blocks is unfortunately pretty common. It is often just a few cameras dotted here and there that form the sperate block (e.g. ret dots in attached 2D Keypoint Matches report)

Screenshot 2021-10-12 103545
Screenshot 2021-10-12 1035451311×779 131 KB

Sometimes Rematch & Reotimize and MTPs fix the issue, but not always. My instinct is to disable the offending cameras (if I can find them) but what do others think? Should I leave them as is?

2

In this case, you have two options:

  • Due to the fact that you only have two uncalibrated cameras, maybe is worth try to manually calibrate it. Here is an article that explains how to do it: How to manually calibrate uncalibrated Cameras in the rayCloud
  • Otherwise, If you consider by looking at the surrounding cameras that they capture more or less the same information as the uncalibrated cameras, and disabling these two cameras will not deprive you of relevant information for your project, then you can consider disabling them.
    Also, I will recommend you to take a look at the following article that also talks about the issue of calibrating cameras on the water surfaces: Is it possible to generate the orthomosaic of water surfaces?

Please let us know if this information is useful for you.

3

Hi Heydi,

Thanks for your advice. Based on what you’ve said, I think in a lot of my cases it would be safe to disable the offending cameras as I usually have a decent amount of overlap in the surrounding cameras.

I wasn’t aware that I could manually calibrate cameras, so I will give it a try if it looks like disabling the camera(s) would leave a gap in my survey.