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03: Entering the complex but wonderful world of Photogrammetry


Hi Guys,

After a short holiday, I’m back in Palermo for a busy semester of work! For my first post after summer I wanted to share my experiences from the CIPA Photogrammetry Summer School in the beautiful city of Zadar, Croatia. I was lucky enough to be a part of the school as my supervisors advised me to go as the school would be featuring the very same base techniques I will be using for my project. Whilst the summer school was focused on cultural heritage, the techniques, software and hardware I was exposed to, are the same as I will use for the pavement distresses. This is important as understanding those are key to being able to transpose them to my project to make it a success.

Ok, enough pretense! Let's get to what the summer school was about! As I said, it was on Photogrammetry but What exactly is this photogrammetry concept I keep mentioning to you? 
To put it simply, it's about taking measurements from images. In our world today we take images all the time, mostly selfies and pictures of cool things we see and want to post to Instagram but they are a big part of social media. Did you know that those images all contain a lot of data and hidden information? Well they do! That hidden information and data can help us figure out a lot of stuff about the objects we capture in the image. Photogrammetry takes measurements on the information within the images on the pixels and uses these measurements to recover where the object is in 3D space. To do this you need atleast two images which have common points. Every point you want to replicate must be visible in atleast 2 images. Through photogrammetry measurements are taken between the points on each photo and we are able to deduce a 3D point! By doing this several times and with more photos you can recreate an entire cloud of points where are then used to generate the 3D shape! This is how you get those cool virtual reality scenarios, how museums replicate objects and galleries in 3D and how alot of movies are made today too. The very basic concept helps make alot of what you see in tv and movies possible!

So relating it to my project, by obtaining multiple photos of the road distress using the concept and the algorithms that exist within the world of photogrammetry I will recreate the 3D point clouds of road distresses and from there generate the 3D models of that same distress patterns!
An example of one of the pavement distress 3D models I've used in my research so far and the images taken to get the model
The summer school led us from the basics of photogrammetry illustrating the basic math involved to some very useful software such as Agisoft Photoscan and CloudCompare wherein we can analyze the point clouds and models we recreate for their accuracy and combine them in other projects. We were lectured on the workflows required for photogrammetry projects and drilled on the importance of planning in your projects. This was very helpful for me as in my mind I started drawing up workflows for how my project will integrate the science of photogrammetry.

We were also given practical exercises where we did surveys of buildings in Zadar and objects in the museums. We then had 2 full days where we got to process the data and have hands on advice from experts from CIPA on using the software  available and analyzing the data! I can’t stress how helpful the team was and how impactful to my project they were. My advice would also be to join CIPA if you are at all interested in cultural heritage and 3D stuff! :) You can join here: JOIN CIPA!

It was a packed schedule of work and at the end of the week we presented our data and analysis in groups to have further feedback on our work. It was really an awesome week for my project and I feel alot more confident moving forward with my work as a result.

My Group presenting our results!
It also helped that we were in such a beautiful city and the organizers also made sure we had tours of the city, after work dinners and hangouts so we got to enjoy the city whilst getting our work done. The city is stunning and the people were friendly and kind. I will definitely be back to Croatia! It was overall terrific organization by the CIPA team! With that I’ll leave you with some pics from Zadar!

Until next time,

 RR12

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Location: Zadar, Croatia

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