To the RealityCapture Development Team,
I am writing to formally request native support for equirectangular (360°) image input in RealityCapture. This feature would greatly improve the software’s utility for modern photogrammetry workflows and capture more of the Geospatial Industry who regularly work with 360 imagery in conjunction with LiDAR data.
Please enable direct import and processing of equirectangular images within RealityCapture, similar to what is currently supported by platforms such as Metashape, Pix4D and WebODM. The only function these platforms automatically handle that RealityCapture does not are:
- Internal undistortion of equirectangular image projection to coordinated (or rigged) cubemaps (and, critically, global feature detection and matching across the whole equirectangular image)
This is a simple function to code, and since the feature detection and matching algorithms before the above function and depth maps algorithm afterwards are the same, your team would need only code the above function and implement into a minor release update. Furthermore, the rigging functionality when importing laser scans already exists in RealityCapture and could perhaps be leveraged for equirectangular image import.
I have invested over 30 hours developing and testing workarounds (i.e. splitting 360 images, duplicating for overlap etc) and found that the critical aspect not possible in RealityCapture that must be achieved for robust alignment and model geometry is global feature detection and matching across the whole equirectangular image.
If the above functionality is implemented (along with the ability to only generate a dense point cloud without a model) I strongly believe that the adoption of RealityCapture across the Geospatial Industry will increase significantly especially since it will bring many firms into the same ecosystem that many architects and designers currently use in Unreal Engine.
I hope this feature can be considered for implementation in an upcoming release.
Yours sincerely,
Michael Faba
Ariva Land Surveys Pty Ltd
Licensed Land Surveyor / Melbourne / Australia
www.arivaconsulting.com.au
