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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I tried to scan my hallway using Meshroom. It took about 3 hours to solve and completely failed on any of the white surfaces. Ok I guess that isn't entirely unexpected but it's not like they were completely free of texture. The solve time was also very disappointing.

Unfortunately there seems to be a huge gap between Meshroom (the best open source solution AFAIK) and commercial solutions like Matterport, or even iPhone apps (yes I know it has a depth camera but even so).

There's also a ton of research results that are way better than Meshroom but unfortunately they never have code that you can actually use.

This sort of thing: https://youtu.be/TZ1eToXQwN0

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I wonder if it would work to project a microdot pattern on those kind of objects..

Obviously you lose the ease-of-use of using your cellphone then, though.

That's kind of what the original Kinect depth camera did. It projected a known constellation of IR dots to help with the 3D reconstruction.

The problem with that approach is that the microdot pattern has to be fixed. SFM type approaches work by doing feature matching between images to determine the correspondence between images. If the microdot pattern changes for each image, the correlation fails.

AIUI, the kinect and similar tools don't do SFM, but rather measure depth by looking at how the micro-dot pattern is distorted.

You could try cutting some colored masking tape into angular pieces, and sticking them on until there's enough places to track.

Good idea but I really shouldn't have to do that and it still shouldn't take 3 hours.

The problem is Meshroom is based on old methods from the Photosynth era.

I imagine eventually some researcher will go the extra mile and provide a modern algorithm in Meshroom, because the rest of Meshroom (tools, interface, etc.) is really good.

Could you explain why those are things you "shouldn't have to do"?

Who owes you this functionality?

It's shorthand for "I believe this is a problem that can be solved by the technology rather than requiring a manual workaround", not "I am entitled to a solution"

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