Meshroom VS OpenMVG (open Multiple View Geometry)

Take a look at Meshroom from https://alicevision.org/

It's a pretty decent tool, although not sure if videos work well.

I once tried to build a mesh from an aerial video by extracting certain frames and the result was ok-ish

You'll need to get some practice with photogrammetry or other 3D scanning to get the appropriate shapes for each animal, this should be more or less something the right size with adequate straps and padding - https://alicevision.org is a good place to learn about photogrammetry.

Have you tried Alice Vision? https://alicevision.org

Huh. https://github.com/alicevision/meshroom/issues/1650 suggests you can get the camera positions into blender, and then putting pyramids views in, and then get the interested area.

Another alternative for ptgui is https://alicevision.org and it is free

A new version of Meshroom released last month, so I decided to compare the performance and results of the two with the same dataset and mostly the same settings.

Photogrametrie https://alicevision.org/

Try to find a community that will know more about openMVG, like the discussion tab on their github.

OpenMVG (JSON, NVM, PLY)

I find openMVG very decent, FTXUI might be a good one and nlohmann's json library is also pretty nice. I don't really know of any project that strictly adheres to the core guidelines, except maybe for some of Jason Turner's (sample) projects.

I am looking for some pointers to papers/open-source software that can do fast and accurate depth estimation from multi-view videos. I am aware of colmap and OpenMVG software but was curious to know if there are others out there that outperform these. I am also interested in any state-of-the-art for depth estimation using unsupervised or self-supervised neural networks.

OpenMVG is super cool, and the project lead Pierre is very generous with his time.

Meshroom is just a Python wrapper for VSfM. OpenMVS seems like the package most customizers are starting to use. https://github.com/openMVG/openMVG