Photogrammetry deals with extraction of building and landscape geometry from photos.
OpenStreetMap project can directly benefit from photogrammetry software provided that it is easy to use and give reliable results
Here all related issues to the topic Photogrammetry & OpenStreetMap can be discussed: ideas, development, own experience of using photogrammety software.
We’ve allready done some tests with the Bundler (http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/bundler/) which is the original basis for Microsoft’s Photosynth.
Among other other things Bundler provides a functinonality to calculate sparse scene geometry and relative camera locations and orientations from matched points between a set of photos.
In order to simplify installation and further development we have rewritten Bundler’s script in Python. Details about their installation and running as well as best practices to take photos for Bundler input can be found at the OSM-wiki: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Photogrammetry
Testing Bundler we’ve found that in many cases Bundler fails to match many photos automatically. This leads to unsatisfactory scene reconstruction (e.g. only one or two reconstructed building sides out of four).
At the moment we investigate possible ways to improve matching of photos.
For a few weeks, I’m looking for a free versions of photosynth, I took aerial pictures of some places with a canon camera, and CHDK software in a canon camera, and a KITE, then I processed this pictures with photosynth, and found that I can know the topography of this areas, but photosynth can’t download or work with the points cloud.
I’ve installed PIL under OS X 10.6 but the RunBundler.py script does not work. Have you any experience getting it to work on the Mac like the blog says it should?