Requires a Photogrammetry with Agisoft or legacy Full Photo license, plus a Metashape license.

Agisoft Ortho Mapping , located on the Sensor tab of the ribbon allows users to automatically drive Metashape for creating orthomosaics and/or point clouds from their photos and insert the Metashape results back into the project from which Metashape was launched. After setting all values press Submit Job to create a job and start the Metashape processing. 

There are additional licensing requirements for licensing Metashape but no additional installation required.

Agisoft Ortho Mapping dialog

Input Settings

Available TrueView Pose Photo Layers - Select the layer or layers that contain the photos that you wish to use in the Metashape processing to generate the orthomosaic. This would typically include all RetainedPhotos layers for every Cycle in the project that covers the desired area.

Note - These photos must be True Pose images, which means their full metadata (including camera calibration) is stored in special GeoCue tags within each photo's EXIF tags.

Processing Location

Agisoft Ortho Mapping allows users to select where the processing operation will run. Local will run the operation on the user's local computer. Cloud processing will run the operation through the cloud with a user's LP360 Online account.

Metered Ortho Mapping

This section is available when Cloud is selected as the Processing Location. This section connects to the user's LP360 Online account and displays the number of photos to be processed, the number of points in the account, and the cost of running the job through the Cloud option.

Output Settings

Apply a priori EO if BBA Fails (Only available if Orientation Quality >= INS) – Recommended for 3DIS®. Always defaulted on for True Pose® photo layers from a TrueView 3DIS®. This option is not available for DJI and other sensors. Directs Metashape to use the photos priori orientations if Block Bundle Adjustment (BBA) fails for an image. 

Example - Images over vegetated areas can sometimes fail to correlate during BBA which causes the images to be omitted when generating the orthomosaic resulting in holes in the ortho. Using the IMU values for these photos will prevent the holes.

Generate Ortho from DEM - Highly recommended for 3DIS®. Creates an orthomosaic using a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) identified by the user. The supplied DEM must be a single GeoTIFF file covering the area of interest. Users can use LP360 to produce the required DEM using the Export Wizard. Once imported to the table of contents, select the layer in the drop-down menu.

Generate Point Cloud/Ortho from Images - Generate a Point Cloud, Ortho, or both from the input images. Select one or both sub-options before continuing. This option will take much longer and will generate a Dense Image Matching (DIM) point cloud.

Note - This option is most often used when working on with 2DIS (image only systems), such as post-processing a P4 RTK or P1 data set.

Generate Point Cloud (LAS) - generate and retain the Dense Image Matching (DIM) point cloud to add to the project during the post-process step.

Generate Ortho - generate and retain the orthomosaic to add to the project during the post-process step.

Bundle Block Adjustment (BBA) Only - Performs only the Bundle Block Adjustment (referred to as alignment in Metashape). This improves the pointing accuracy of images that will be used in Image Explorer by improving the True Pose® information when not generating an orthomosaic. Also useful for troubleshooting.

Output Locations

Output Point Cloud - Activates with appropriate Output Setting selection. Determines whether output Point Cloud will be added to an existing layer or placed on a newly created layer.

Output Ortho - Activates when appropriate Output Setting selection. Determines whether output Ortho will be added to an existing layer or placed on a newly created layer.

Advanced Settings

Used to modify the default settings. Once settings are adjusted, click OK to apply settings or click Reset to set back to default settings.

Agisoft Ortho Mapping Advanced Settings dialog

Alignment Settings

Alignment Accuracy - Selects the input photo resolution that is used in the Block Bundle Adjustment (BBA) step. Higher resolutions result in a more accurate BBA but increases the processing time. High is recommended. Select from:

Camera Calibration - Select between using a priori camera calibration or allowing Metashape to calibrate the camera as part of the BBA process. For pre-calibrated sensors (usually the case with GeoCue workflows, but not the case for DJI L1/L2), you should select "Use Sensor Fixed Calibration" to use the camera calibrations for your system that are stored on Reckon. 

Note - You cannot perform "GCP-free" geopositioning if you do not have a pre-calibrated camera.

Point Cloud Settings

Dense Cloud Quality – Sets the resolution of the input photos during the dense cloud formation part of the processing. As with BBA, a higher setting provides higher quality but at the expense of increased processing time. Each level is approximately four times the processing time of the level below it. Medium is recommended. Select from:

Dense Cloud Filtering – Adjusts the aggressiveness of the smoothing filter applied after the point cloud formation. Mild is recommended. Select from:

Tile Point Cloud using Dense Cloud Tile Size – Forms the resultant point cloud into a set of tiled LAS files. LP360 prefers smaller file sizes, so it is better to tile when generating a point cloud, such that each LAS is less than 256MB when using QVR pyramids and 4GB when using LPLAS.

Add Point Confidence Extra Bytes to LAS File – The Agisoft confidence, or reliability extra byte, can be an additional attribute useful when determining the suitability of a DIM point for ground classification. The value represents the number of depth maps used for the given point generation. The noisy areas of the dense cloud will have lower confidence, and you can use the extra byte filter options in the Input Point Filter/Live View dialog to exclude the noisy points from point cloud processing or views.

Ortho Settings

Ortho Compression Method – Select from No compression, JPEG, LZW, Packbits, or Deflate. JPEG recommended.

JPG Quality – If a JPEG compression method is used, specify the desired quality, with 1 being the lowest and 100, the highest. Recommended to use 90 for a good quality to compression ratio.

Ortho Background Color – Select a black or white background color for the void pixels in the image.

Optimal GSD from Images – Allow Metashape to determine the optimal ground sample distance for the orthomosaic from the input photos. i.e., Full resolution.

Ortho Ground Sample Distance (GSD) – The user may deselect the Optimal GSD from Images option and enter a desired GSD in the project units.

Include Alpha Channel – The alpha channel is a special channel on the image that handles transparency. Typically included, but users of older CAD programs, such as MicroStation v8i, need to uncheck this option if the program cannot handle images with an alpha channel included.

MSConfig.yml

Agisoft Ortho Mapping also uses a settings file, MSConfig.yml to set some less commonly configurable settings for the resulting orthomosaic that are not displayed on this dialog. The defaults are the recommended settings for best practice. To modify these, you can do so directly in the MSConfig file. Select the appropriate one depending on whether you wish the settings change to affect a single execution of Agisoft Ortho Mapping, a single LP360 project, or any project run on the machine.

For a single Agisoft Ortho Mapping job:

The MSConfig file used for an Agisoft Ortho Mapping job is found in <project folder>/Jobs/<yymmdd_hhmmss>_MFE. It is based on the union of the Agisoft Ortho Mapping Advanced Settings dialog configured for a job and the MSConfig file found in the project folder.

For a single project:

The MSConfig file found in the project folder is created from the MSConfig found in %PROGRAMDATA%/LP360/MSPyOrtho, the first time Agisoft Ortho Mapping is run on a project.

For all projects on a machine:

The MSConfig found in %PROGRAMDATA%/LP360/MSPyOrtho is copied from the %COMMONPROGRAMFILES%/LP360/MSPy38 folder the first time Agisoft Ortho Mapping is run on a machine.

Example settings only found in MSConfig.yml:

BuildOrthomosaic: refine_seamlines – default is False. Recommended: True. Use smart algorithm to identify photo seamlines where they will least distort.

BuildOrthomosaic: ghosting_filter – Default is False. True enables the Metashape ghosting filter, which is useful to improve the texture if the quality of the dataset is not very good (for example, there can be moving objects, patches of reflected light, unwanted objects in the foreground, etc.). Useful when generating the DEM from the photos, but it increases processing time.

BuildOrthomosaic: calibrate_colors – useful to even the brightness and white balance of the images over the data set. Please note that for large data sets the Calibrate colors procedure can turn out to be quite time consuming.

cal_colors_whte_balance – ignored if calibrate_colors is False. Additional option to be switched on if white balance should be evened as well.

cal_colors_use_tie_points – if false, uses DEM if available, else Model. If false, uses DEM if available, else uses the Model. Defines what data should be taken as the basis for overlapping areas estimation. It is preferable to select the source data type according to the surface on which you plan to project the orthomosaic. 

Submit Ortho Mapping Job

Submit the Agisoft Ortho Mapping processing to the Job Manager queue for processing. Open the Job Manager to monitor the progress. When the job finishes processing and is in the Ready state, select Complete Job to add the new Ortho Layer and/or raster file, and for 2DIS, the new LAS Layer and/or LAS file(s) to the currently open project based on the settings at the time the job was submitted. In addition, completing the job will update the EXIFs on each photo to the bundle block adjusted values.

Note: If the run location selected was Cloud, you will be asked to browse for the 7z file you downloaded from the link in the job completion e-mail.

How to use Agisoft Ortho Mapping?

See the tutorial for How to use Agisoft Ortho Mapping.