OpenMVG (open Multiple View Geometry) VS meshroom

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

I have been recently looking at several "3d scanning" from monocular images/videos solutions and although they make for impressive demos I'm afraid they are a few years away from robust results.

On one hand you have traditional photogrammetry based on classical image descriptors (from the beginning of the 2000s). A nice open source solution is Meshroom [1]. I have very little experience as I have just tinkered a little but I would say they work OK with geometry of medium complexity and detailed textures. They fail horribly with untextured objects, like for example a candle. They are semi-automatic: you upload some photos and run the pipepiline but for best results it's easy to tweak as there are a lot of knobs to try.

On the other hand you have these deep learning research papers. A lot of them have Colab notebooks you can try yourself (which is awesome, thank you). They can give you these very nice demos for some kind of objects (the ones we have a lot of training data, like human bodies), but they are not truly general and sometimes will generate artifacts. There is some opportunity here if they are integrated in a semi-supervised workflow, like this [2].

Anyway, just curious and not an expert.

[1] https://alicevision.org/

If you can, don't fuck with this shit and use/support open source software.

https://alicevision.org/#meshroom

I know there is this github repo https://github.com/alicevision/meshroom

still in development, but yes that's possible if you're willing to put time on it: https://github.com/alicevision/meshroom/wiki/Using-known-camera-positions

Maybe you can use AliceVision to generate that information.

You can input your photos into Meshroom using a capable computer or Colab. Even if you're only interested in some of the depthmaps, you'll have to input a full set of images around the object. It will take 2-4 times longer than default but for your usecase you may want to change the 'Downscale' attribute to 1.

I know this is r/fossdroid, but I don't think there is any Foss Android application capable of that. However, meshroom came into my mind. It is free and open source with linux support. The downside of it is that you can't create the model right in your phone, but you first need to take many photos to then upload to your computer and process.