Speeding up Agisoft Photoscan

For some of the copter data processing folks Agisoft Photoscan turns out to be the most important tool/software to calculate point clouds, orthoimages and nadir data mosaics from copter  photographs.

Problem: very long processing times with dense point cloud calculations with high or ultra-high settings (full resolution image matching with SfM (Structure from Motion) algorithms).

Some nice net finds show how multicore processing has its limits and why you should invest into GPU performance … and in high end 3D graphic cards.

Combining more than 20 CPU cores doesnt seem to speed up the process and combining more than 4 GPU systems also doesnt seem to help. There is only a minimal speed increase when you add more CPUs and or more GPUs when a 24 core system is already installed.

http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/115283/en-us
http://www.agisoft.com/downloads/system-requirements/
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Agisoft-PhotoScan-GPU-Acceleration-710/

It boils down to a dedicated system with 2-4 Graphic cards with 3D acceleration (GTX-1080ti cards from Nvidea or if you can afford it a TESLA p100 based system), with approx 64-128 GB RAM and a dual i7 system setup.

mtk – Sören