We have a new tool that allows the automatic detection of targets (tags) in images and generates a Pix4Dmapper project file (.p4d) that will use these tags as Manual tie Points or GCPs.
It is meant to be a very useful utility for indoor mapping and for merging automatically difficult datasets.
Feel free to try it and give us your feedback!
You can find the executable, instructions and more information here:
Are you planning on making any updates to this? I do have a couple of questions.
Do you plan on providing more than 10 images?
For a big office building where we need more than 10, can we take multiple data sets and then merge them to create 1 big project? Or will the tags get confused?
Right now, we do not plan on adding more images. However, you can take multiple data sets (projects), and have the tags in each project. You can then process each subproject. To make sure that two different MTPs with the same tag are not identified as the same, you should either change the names in the subprojects, or explicitly say that MTPs with the same name are not the same during the merging procedure.
If the tags are printed to a known size, it would be sensible to have the option of using the tags as ‘scaling units’ in situations where we dont have an accurate GPS available. At least then our scenes would be properly scaled…?
Also, can we have about 1000 of these tags? We can’t easily reuse them as we have many fields with markers that need to stay in place and is confusing to use large number of markers.
3.Could we have an option for tags to all be the same, e.g. white squares. Our tags are well-spaced and we never have two in the same image. So if a list of GCPs is provided, the tag can be assigned to the GCP that is closest to the GPS EXIF info of the image that contains that tag (as long as no other tags are nearby).
Indeed, if there is no GPS information available for the target, then the target cannot be used as Ground Control Point (GCP) and it will not have an influence on the scale of the project. In this case, as you mentioned, it would make sense to add a scale constraint if the size of the target is known. This article describes how a scale constraint can be added to the project: https://support.pix4d.com/hc/en-us/articles/205360375
At the moment Pix4Dtagger is compatible with the “Chilitags” library. The latter includes about 1000 different tags. Note that in a single project, each tag should be unique so that the software does not mix-up the different tags. Hence, if some areas do never appear in the same projects, it would be possible to reuse certain tags.
Thank you for your recommendation. We have transferred it to our Product Team. At the moment another approach is used, where each tag would be identified uniquely in a project and the measured GCP coordinates are associated to a specific tag.
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