I lately
compared Agisoft, a commercial desktop image processing software product with OpenDroneMap.
As said
OpenDroneMap (OSDM) is free open-source software and Agisoft is commercial proprietary
software. I tested the software on
difficult (forest) images, taken in northern Finland, in the late afternoon,
during July 2020. The results were striking, Agisoft did not have any problems
with the data, creating a decent orthomosaic and 3D model. I did not do much
tweaking, and basically used the default settings.
WebODM and
ODM however did have problems, I used the latest versions of the software, but
the end result did show consistently a stripe of unmatched images in the SE
part of the mosaic. It seemed that most parameters did not have any influence
upon the result, only two had major effect, the min_max_features, which I set
to 32000 and the image resolution, which I kept to the original size (-1). The images were taken in two runs, about ten
minutes apart to change batteries.
Based on
these experiences I could say that it makes sense to take images using good conditions,
fair wind, short exposure time and a lot of overlap. ODM is doing well under
optimal conditions, but for less-than-optimal conditions Agisoft is the winner.
