Intercomparison of photogrammetry software for three-dimensional vegetation modelling

Photogrammetry-based three-dimensional reconstruction of objects is becoming increasingly appealing in research areas unrelated to computer vision. It has the potential to facilitate the assessment of forest inventory-related parameters by enabling or expediting resource measurements in the field. We hereby compare several implementations of photogrammetric algorithms (CMVS/PMVS, CMPMVS, MVE, OpenMVS, SURE, and Agisoft PhotoScan) with respect to their performance in vegetation assessment. The evaluation is based on (a) a virtual scene where the precise location and dimensionality of objects is known a priori and is thus conducive to a quantitative comparison, and (b) using series of in-situ acquired photographs of vegetation with overlapping field of view where the photogrammetric outcomes are compared quantitatively. Performance is quantified by computing ROC curves that summarize the type-I and type-II errors between the reference and reconstructed tree models. Similar artifacts are observed in synthetic- and in-situ-based reconstructions.