CameraMatch aerial view

[Kelly Seminoff]

I'm just getting familiar with the new camera match tools and have successfully set up some street level views. What I need help with is matching an aerial view I captured from Google Earth, which shows my site and the surrounding context fairly well. I've been able to set up the red and green vanishing points but when it comes to the vertical blue axis it asks me to flip red and green and gives me an upside down view. Does camera match always assume the vertical vanishing point is above the horizon?

 

Any tips or tricks?

 

Being able to do this would be really useful when working drone photography too.

 

The attachment shows the image I'm working with. The site is the parking lot in the middle.

[willofmaine]

I think a photograph taken with a camera is critical to Camera Match's success.  For example, a photograph shouldn't be cropped prior to its being used by Camera Match to establish the position of a camera.  I don't know much about Google Earth, but I think it's essentially a simple 3D model with photographic textures applied?  So, maybe it simply can't generate a "real" enough "photograph" for Camera Match to work with... 

[Matt Panzer]

Hi Kelly,

Will is right that the photo image is critical in obtaining a good match. Distortion in photos can cause incorrect vanishing point locations that throw off the calculations. The calculations are far more complex than one might think.  :-)

 

As for cropped photos: Older versions of Camera Match require uncropped photos, but improvements were added later to eliminate that requirement.

 

I must admit, I've never tried matching to a Google Earth image, but I think it might be possible. Since Google Earth is generating the image from images mapped to 3D geometry (as Will mentioned) in perspective, the image may be very similar to a real photo. Just to be clear, Google Earth images are NOT similar to Google Street images.  Google Street images will most likely not work well because they're made up of multiple photos (with multiple sets of vanishing points) stitched together.

 

If you'd like to send me the file, I can have a look.

Edited January 7, 2017 by Matt Panzer
typo: changed "uncrossed" to "uncropped"